The one legged squat

The one legged squat. One of the best bodyweight exercises i've encountered. By my math, when performing one, it is the same as doing a weighted squat with nearly your bodyweight on your shoulders. allow me to explain.

Take a 200lb person. Normaly, when doing a 2 legged squat without any additional weight, he would be lowering and lifting the majority of that weight (feet are completely stationary, and you could argue about the amount of weight vs distance traveled in the legs). lets say this is 180lbs of weight that actually moves. now, the individual has 2 supports, as he is using both legs. this means each leg is responcible for 90lbs. if he were to put 200lbs on his shoulders, each leg would then be responcible for 190lbs by the same math. half of the total load. Now, if on ONE leg, the argument that your not lifting your whole bodys weight looses half of its strength. and that one leg is responcible for lifting ALL of your bodys weight, save half of what we decided was dead weight previously. your lifting 190lbs on that leg. Sound like a familiar number?

But, theres more! now instead of having a pair of supports that can play off eachother for balance, you only have one! what kind of factor does this play? How do you mathamaticly show the differance in difficulty?

I thought one-legged squats were called Pistols?

Pistols are a varient of the one legged squat. The basic one legged squat requires you to simply perform a squat using one leg. Typicaly one lowers oneself until the knee of the non-lifting leg is just millimeters from the floor. The pistol is a much arder varient. hen performing a pistol, you attempt to keep the non-lifting leg level with the floor below. It requires much greater concentration, flexibility, and stability.

CJ tells me that in Ballet, they somehow use the Hamstring to lift the leg. I think this may be one of the keys to successfully performing the pistol.