Mike Boyle - The Death of the Conventional Squat?

[coreJack]

http://www.functionalstrengthcoach3.com/squats.html

Provocative piece. Of course, the depth inconsistency could entirely explain the discrepancy between single leg squat and regular squat capabilities. Also, if the back is indeed the limiting factor in the conventional squat, that means you are training a weakness - last I checked, that's a good thing. Further, if single leg squats let you bypass relative back weakness and further strengthen the legs, might that set someone up for injury b/c now their extremity muscles are too strong relative to their core?

I like some of Boyle's work, but I think this piece was irresponsible. You don't advise people to abandon a time tested effective exercise like the squat until you have solid evidence, which he does not. Seems to me like he stumbled onto an interesting discovery, namely that people tended to be able to single leg squat more than 1/2 their regular squat, and decided to rush to market with sensational new training advice.

[Mark Rippetoe]

The likelihood of Mike Boyle's article causing the wholesale abandonment of the squat is exactly the same as my disapproval of the consumption of soy causing chaos in the commodities markets tomorrow morning. It is irrelevant to the fact that squats, deadlifts, cleans, presses, and bench presses make weak people strong and Coach Boyle's program does not.

Be calm. Train as if this never happened and everything will be fine.

[matclone]

Ha, ha, ha. I'm reading the link to Boyle's website. It reads like an infomercial, and sure enough I get to the bottom and he's selling a product. Nothing wrong with selling a product, but puffery (even false information) has been used to sell products for eons. Muscle building (no, let's extend this to fitness magazines in general), with maybe the exception of Perry Rader's Iron Man (long gone) have operated on this principle for years. Exaggerate. Make entirely one-sided arguments that your product (or information) is comprable to sliced bread. Write something that sounds like you've come up with some great new discovery, and people who like to be told this stuff, even people who are otherwise intelligent, will buy it.

Why Rippetoe's books are exceptional. Anyone with any ability to separate the wheat from the chaff recognizes this, even instinctively.

[Baker]

man, if only someone had told people like kirk karwoski that squatting is not a lower body exercise, but just a lower back exercise, then he wouldn't have those weak, pencil-thin legs from all those wasted years of squatting. if he had known about lunges and step-ups, he'd have big, strong legs like boyle instead.

seriously, i asked this on another forum:
how many people have gotten big, strong legs from squatting?
how many people have gotten big, strong legs from lunges?

[spur]

Its funny because irrespective what he says about the back squat not being part of his program Mike Boyle recommends Starting Strength as a must have

[Mark Rippetoe]

I find this difficult to believe. Perhaps he likes the cover art?

[unochamp1]

His reasoning in the video is a bit odd. He says that he got his freshmen to do 115lb for 15 reps on each leg, but if he asked them to do a 230lb squat they wouldn't be able to 5 reps. Isn't he making a point against himself here? I bet the guy who can do a 230lb squat for 15 reps (or even 5 reps) has a lot bigger legs. And if size and strength have a rough correlation then the guy squatting 230lb is way stronger than the guy lunging 115lbs. Or is my logic off somewhere?

[Mark Rippetoe]

Your logic is fine. His is the obvious problem.

[coreJack]

Originally Posted by unochamp1

His reasoning in the video is a bit odd. He says that he got his freshmen to do 115lb for 15 reps on each leg, but if he asked them to do a 230lb squat they wouldn't be able to 5 reps. Isn't he making a point against himself here? I bet the guy who can do a 230lb squat for 15 reps (or even 5 reps) has a lot bigger legs. And if size and strength have a rough correlation then the guy squatting 230lb is way stronger than the guy lunging 115lbs. Or is my logic off somewhere?

Without having purchased his program, I would guess his point is that the trainee can increase their functional strength faster by doing the Boylercize with 115 lbs on one leg than they could by squatting 175 lbs (or whatever) on both legs. He may have a further point (again, I'm guessing) that the trainee is less likely to suffer back injury performing the Boylercize than squatting.

As far as I know, he hasn't offered any real evidence to substantiate any claims that the Boylercize is superior to the back squat in any way, but maybe he will if you shell out the money? I wonder if all the folks who switched to the front squat because of him get their money back now that he seems to have abandoned the front squat as well.

[Jon Nosferatu]

I remember having to address this a while back on another forum, actually (he wrote an article on it somewhere). My points (iirc) were:

1) His testing parameters are iffy. He tested it by having them do it for a few weeks before he actually took the measurements; after taking weeks off of bilateral squatting and doing exclusively Split Squats, there's going to be some disparity.
2) Testing what you can do in training is very different from testing what happens from a results standpoint. Yeah, sure, these guys can handle higher mathematical loads on one leg, but how does that translate into the results?
3) "All right, you have a point, but..." nobody ever said that unilateral movements were useless and shouldn't be done. The fact that you can handle higher mathematical loads one way doesn't justify omitting the other way just because there's one limiting factor that's going to be present in most practical expressions of strength anything.

Unilateral movements are good for supplemental work, etc., and I suppose an athlete using a Westside or Westside-esque template could get some good use out of using them on Max-Effort day, but (as everyone reading this probably already knows) the notion of completely omitting regular squats on such shaky grounds is utterly absurd.