!!!!!!!!!!!!PISTOL SQUAT BREAKTHROUGH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

No, I can't toss them off as quickly and deeply as Z, BUT I have just discovered, after umpteen months of wavering dedication and mixed results, the missing key to that treasure chest of lactic-acid burning and actin/myosin-tearing delight:

I hold onto something on the way down so that my crappy sense of balance does not tip me out of my descent prematurely, and then, once I'm set into a solid single leg squat, I relinquish my armature and power up cleanly, though painfully, though thrillingly.

My problem has been that I'm too wobbly on the way down and, though I still get a workout, I'm perhaps not targeting the right muscles and definitely not getting as much as I could out of it except a possible injury.  I just don't have enough strength to stabilize as I'm lowering into the squat and I end up doing shallower squats that aren't as satisfying.  There is something about powering way up out of a deep squat that releases so much tension and negativity but I just couldn't get into that range on a single leg.

So, shortly after embarking on this pistol squat journey sometime last year, I figured that---

argggh--we are now living in not-quite-absolute-nowhere and I'm trying to remain positive (denial's not negative, is it?), but if this crappy internet craps out once more on the best ah.fm episode I've heard in a while (Kiholm/Globetrotter, props!), I might toss something--

--anyway, I figured that if I held onto something while performing the squats, this would be a good intermediary stage, like doing pushups from knees.  NOPE!  It ended up being a shoulder exercise, no matter what I tried to support myself with.  I couldn't find anything the right height, nothing to help me exchange wobble for a raw true squat.  There seemed to be no way to break this exercise down.

So, for many months, I wobbled in and out of shallow unsatisfying pistol squats and eventually got to the point where I could perform one or two near-perfect ones (late at night at work usually--standing on a contaminated floor increases focus dramatically), but we then moved around for a month and I got out of my routine, got glutened, sick, etc, and now I'm rebuilding muscle once again.

Today, I was giving zwow #12 another whirl in the bedroom and I looked at the bed footrail and thought about resting against it only on the way down

:) :) :) :) :) : ) : ) : ) : )  : )  : )  :  )  :  )  :  )   :   )   :   )

Before that, we jogged for about 62 minutes, same route as last time, although I walked up a few hills this time (not the thrilling triplet--those hills are considerably higher than I remembered, but I couldn't miss out on the fun), and my energy level was low and I couldn't get my breathing to settle on the flats and downhills.  We saved time because the dog didn't take a dump, and maybe we were moving faster than I realized, I guess.  So-so run, but the pistol squats totally pumped me up after that slog (hence the parentheses and general grammatical spewing, so sorry!)