Ah, yes, the pistol...

I know how cultish the squat worship can sound. Believe me. I'm a priest in the cult. I have all the hymns memorized and have performed a living sacrifice or two.

But there has been critical thinking poured into this particular dogma. It's a refrain born from experience and now beautifully elucidated in the first chapter of Starting Strength.

I used to have every excuse in the world why squats weren't "for me" and I wove together arguments for why a combination of front squats, pistols and deadlifts were just as good and maybe even superior for people like me who "weren't built for squatting." I've heard it all before. Hell, I've said it all before too. "The same things don't work for everybody", "Not everyone is built to benefit from the squat; some won't ever do it properly", etc.

I'm not sure exactly when I realized that I was just finding excuses. It was a little before I even knew about Rip and SS. At some point I realized that the squat held tremendous benefit for me and that I'd just been scared of it. I finally got my squat from two plates up to three. Then I discovered SS and cleaned up my squat form even more and have since gone from three plates to four. The benefits have been so profound that I've become something of a zealot. I am finally getting strong, all over.

Yeah, yeah, internet testimonial, anecdotal evidence, blah blah blah. The reasoning has been laid out (Rip and Dr. Kilgore will go down in training history for their little apologia) and the experience of millions is there. I know it to be true and I'll argue for it all day: the back squat is THE lift. If you're not doing it and driving your numbers in it up, your program is not nearly as optimal as it could be. Should everyone back squat? Yeah, probably. But you don't have to. You don't have to do anything.