Pistol Squat Progression

Workout 1 - designed to initiate pistol squat training from the ground up.

Workout 2 - a more challenging routine for individuals nearing the achievement of a full pistol squat.

To properly warm up for the Pistol Squat, you simply need to warm up the muscles around the hips, knees, and ankle joints by moving them around with intent or doing some named mobility movements. Then, do some warm-up sets for the main exercise. For example:

Light Mobility Drill: Hip Circles -> Standing Hip Openers -> Knee Circles -> Ankle Circles for a round or two with enough reps for you to feel them working.

Warm-Up Set/s: You can either do your main exercises or do some other relatively easy core exercise and do some reps or duration far from failure to use and warm up the same muscle groups.

Just make sure that whatever you do is just enough to work and warm up your muscles, not tire them, so you can perform your best in your working sets.

Choose a lower-body exercise that has a similar movement pattern to that of the Pistol Squat that you can do near failure within the specified rep range. These can be lower-body exercises like Bodyweight Squats and Bodyweight Lunges.

You simply have to choose or modify an exercise for you to be able to do that within the specified rep range to build both strength and muscle mass on the main muscle groups involved.

Determine what your limiting factors are in your Pistol Squat training, and then choose exercises for those limitations. These typically include single-leg balancing, hip flexion strength for the extended leg, and lagging muscle groups like the quadriceps and gluteal muscles.

The template recommends 2 to 4 sets for the main exercise. Leaning toward the higher end — 3 to 4 sets — tends to be more beneficial if you are relatively new to training. Research shows that less-trained individuals voluntarily activate a smaller percentage of their available motor unit pool — even at maximal effort — leaving more motor units unstimulated per set.

Additional sets provide more high-effort recruitment opportunities before fatigue accumulates and begins limiting motor unit recruitment. As neural efficiency improves with training, each set becomes more effective at reaching higher-threshold motor units, and 2 to 3 sets may be sufficient.

This is a strength-specific progression where training frequency matters — more sessions mean more neural practice opportunities. Keeping each session manageable enough to recover fully before the next one is what sustains that frequency. While 1–2 RIR is generally better for this reason, it's still useful to go to task failure (0 RIR) early on when you don't yet have a feel for what near-failure is, to avoid undertraining.

With this, you should compensate for it by ensuring other training variables are optimized for recovery, like nutrition, sleep, stress management, and overall training volume. But then, after getting the hang of the feeling of going until failure, it's better to stay in 1 - 2 RIR and use going until failure sparingly.

For strength progressions like this, a relatively high training frequency is beneficial — more sessions mean more practice opportunities, which primarily drives the neural and motor pattern adaptations behind skill-based strength gains. Fatigue is an unavoidable byproduct of training, so the goal is to keep each session's effort manageable enough to recover fully before the next one. Every other day or 2–3 times a week are both reasonable options, the latter providing a slightly longer recovery window between sessions.

There's not much to do aside from building size and strength by simply doing bodyweight squats and increasingly adjusting to single-leg squats like assisted pistol squats while addressing other limitations until you're finally able to do unassisted pistol squats. It is as straightforward as that. You simply need consistency and to make sure that you are properly doing everything in the training session and be able to fully recover every training session.