Anyone out there doing them on a regular basis? how many and how often?
I do them about every other day along with my other bodyweight exercises.
For my lower body I do:
5 x 30-50 Hindu squats alternated with
5 x 20 - 30 Boot strappers and
5 x 20 Lunges (20 per side) or 5 x 15-20 bleacher lunges and finally
5 x 10 Snatches/Swings with a 53lb Kettlebell (this is both upper and lower body)
KG
I got up to a personal best of 400 straight, it took me several months. I was doing them 4-5 times a week. Now I’ve ditched them in favor of pistols and jumping rope (now that the weather’s nice), but I still like to end my leg workouts with 25-50 hindu squats, only I do them explosively now, rather than smoothly as I did before.
what are pistols?
pistols = one legged squats
Ah! how the hell do you start out doing those? I have been wanting to for some time but have no idea how to begin!
There’s a couple of different ways you could “ease” into doing these. The easiest is starting them with a chair or stairs behind you. Lower yourself down and touch the chair with your glutes. This will limit the range of motion for the exercise, hence they’re easier. Once this gets easy, start using a ladder or stairs behind you (instead of the chair) and incrementally go lower. Once you get comfortable, go solo with no assistance… Once these get easier, then add weight. 
I had a link for an article on Intesity Mag, but it doesn’t seem to work anymore…
The second way is to do ‘bleacher squats’. This is when you support one of your feet on a chair behind you and squat down on the unsupported leg..
KG
Try http://www.intensitymagazine.com/02-26-02/mike_mahler.html What you need is flexibility in your glutes, good balance, and some strength in your legs and abs. I recommend you start with the regular hindu’s until you can do 200-300, just to make sure your knees can take it. I actually waited till I could do 400 because of my past history of knee problems. Pistols are a friggin great exercise and are like a power-lifting exercise rather than a body-building, because you don’t emphasize the negative portion of the rep, you should combine that with long rest periods between sets.
Pistol squats are a mean *****. I will stick with the freeweight work for the legs as I prefer to not look stupid falling on my clumsy white bread ass doing pistols.
I do like kicking squats though. Go down and come up and kick with one leg, go down and come up and kick with the other. They burn pretty good.
r5a,
I found the new link for the article I mentioned here.
This is the same article fa_jing mentions in his post, but the new URL.
KG
Pistols also take a good deal of strength in the glutes.
Thanks for the links guys and the advice!
I hate to sound stupid,
But what the he1l are Hindu squats?
PAMantis - Bodyweight squats essentially. Stand with your feet shoulder width apart and your arms cross horizontally in front of your chest. As you lower your body to your heels, swing your arms back to help balance yourself. As you come back up to a standing position swing arms back in front of your chest.
Gotcha! Ok, so I’ve been doing them for a while just didn’t know it. I do at least 100 of them every day as a warm-up. I guess I should start increasing the number and working into pistols so that I can get a better workout. A question though? If i have knee problems will the pistols make them any worse? I have petella femoral syndrome, basically the inside of my quads are too strong and pull my kneecap out of the groove that it’s supposed to be in.
Thanks!
PAMantis,
Yes, be careful when starting the pistols. If the supporting ligaments around your knees are weak or have other structural problems you need to ease into it. Use the guidelines in the article I linked above (and also briefly mentioned in an earlier post).
Personally I found using “Bleacher squats” to be the easiest way to transition into pistols (as one of your legs is still being supported by a chair or whatnot), but it may be different for everyone.
KG
Edit: ********PAMantis, I just realized that you have the OPPOSITE problem with your knees, mine track to the OUTSIDE because the OUTSIDE tendons are too tight. See my last post below.
PAMantis: hey, I have that patella tracking disfunction too! Welcome to the club heh heh…I’ve been dealing with it for over ten years now, and overall I keep getting better and better from my low point when I had to quit TKD…These exercises are all going to be difficult for you because they require you to bend the leg all of the way - which causes our patella’s to jump their track to the outside. Go to www.cbass.com, scroll down to article #76 for some good photos of the Hindu squat. BTW you push straight down (gently) with the arms and swing up (briskly). You must go slow at first and pay attention to your form. Try to make small adjustments to your balance and your weight distribution to make it easier on your knees - for instance when I start to raise myself from the bottom position, I sometimes let my knees dip slightly as I initiate the movement. Your arm swing will also help you for the first couple inches as far as reducing the stress on your knees. After a few weeks of practice, I began to have knee irritation from Hindu Squats - I considered stopping, but decided to try to work through it, as a challenge to myself and my knees - I’m happy to say that I did work through it by keeping to a moderate # of reps at first, and now they don’t bother my knees at all, I think they’ve made them stronger.
Now pistols are even harder on my knees and more of a challenge. Especially my left knee which is worse, but even my right knee cracks up quite a bit with pistols. So what I do is instead of relaxing totally at the bottom position, I maintain tension in my quads throughout. Also, when my butt lightly touches my calves, I stop going down - instead of it squishing it’s way down another inch (sorry if that was graphic :D). FWIW, I find it slightly better on my knees if I am holding a 15 pound dumbell rather than no weight, and when I did a double on each side this weekend with a 53 pound kettlebell, I found that it didn’t bother my knees at all, although I definitely felt it in my glutes the following day!
Lastly, as you may know, the therapy for our condition is to do leg extensions on the machine, but only going through the 30 degrees of motion closest to full extension of the leg. This targets the head of the quadriceps that is closest to the inside of your knee. I did these off and on over the years, and they were very helpful. I don’t do them now, but I find that something like jumping rope is good because it also targets this range of motion.
I don’t think Pistols require that much quad strength. Or something. Here’s why:
Once time after a bodybuilding squat workout (10 sets of 5 reps with 1 min rest), I could barely walk. You know the shakey leg feeling you get after doing lots of squats. Anyway, I decided to try some pistols and I could still do them. Now, if pistols work your quads so well, how the hell could I still do them when I could barely walk in the first place because my quads were fried?
I weighed probably around 170 at the time, but my legs have always sucked cuz I’m an ectomorph so it’s not like I got tired with squatting a LOT of weight and then pistols were lighter weight or something. I’ve never been able to squat a lot of weight, but that’s a different story.
So, that’s why I say pistols suck at building quad strength. Sure, they require awesome balance and flexibility (most people can’t keep their foot flat on the ground when they do them and have to come up on their toes when they first start),.
Or maybe it’s just my personal genetics that makes them not use my quads, kind of like how my shoulders come in to play in everything I do regardless of how I try to keep them out 
IronFist
IF - good point, however I think a better experiment would be to do a pistols workout (5 X 5 ?), then find out what’s sore or weak afterward. Furthermore, from the bottom position you have the option of mentally emphasizing the glutes, or the quads to varying degrees. No matter what it emphasizes, it is a good strength building exercise for your lower body, especially if you take long breaks between sets, as you know. Because the emphasis is on the concentric part of the movement.
I would point out that if you keep an upward intention in your hanging leg, it also works the top of your thighs near the front. I like to especially emphasize picking up the hanging leg on my last rep per set (moreso than the mike mahler pics, for example). Because this tires the other leg, for this reason I always wait at least 20 seconds before starting the other side.
BTW, my theory is that a pistol, being performed with your body’s full weight on one leg, is roughly equivilant to performing a full range two-legged squat supporting double your body weight, that is to say your bodyweight plus the same amount on your shoulders. So a pistol for a 180 pound man is equivilant to doing a full-range two legged squat carrying 180 pounds. If you now add to your bodyweight by holding a weight such as a kettlebell, then double that weight too, while calculating the equivilant for a two legged squat. So I weigh 187 or so. I pulled off a double, BARELY, with both sides holding a 53 pound kettlebell. I say that this is roughly equivilant to doing a full-range two-legged squat with 187 + (53 * 2) = 293 lbs. for two reps. I don’t belong to a gym to be able to test that out - curious if you all agree with me.