How to Do a Chair Pistol Lower Body Exercise

Video Transcript

"Hi , I'm Dr. Garrett Smith with Expert Village. This next exercise that we're going to do are called chair pistols. They're a modified pistol where you're basically going to have something elevated that you can sit to so you don't have to go all the way down. We're building strength, progressing to the full pistol or one legged squat. Important thing before you do these, you need to build a balance on one leg. Next thing, you need to know if the chair's going to be in the right position, so it's good to, you know, a normal sitting position, you want to know that's it's going to be right where your bum is going to be in a second. We're up on one leg, take the starting position of what will become a normal pistol, and then you are going to sit in the chair with one leg. We're going to reach back, sit in the chair. When you're starting on these, you're just going to do that lowering part. You're going to stand up with both legs, bring one leg forward, arms are reaching forward, sit down. Both legs, stand up. We're just learning how to control ourselves lowering. I've had patients have to start on these on a desk height because they could only go down a couple of inches without losing control. Stand up with both legs, reach forward, sit down. The next step in this progression would then be, we're sitting down with one leg, then we're going to keep that leg out and we're going to stand up. Again, these tax your balance. We're going down and then we stand up. We've got two variations there. Just sitting down, or called the eccentric or negative part of the exercise, and then where we do the full repetition where we go all the way down and we come back up. Now, as we get stronger over time, if somebody had to start at desk height to begin with and they can get to the point where they can sit down and get back up for five, ten repetitions, then we might lower it to the chair. They get to the point where they can go down and up five, ten repetitions, then the easiest thing that I see around is typically something like a step that you can adjust. Or, if you have steps in your house or someplace, you can go down to the bottom step. We're basically just moving the height of the step down so that people get that range of motion strong as they're going. "