THE OG: The Sissy Squat

Let's take an in-depth look at this much-misunderstood exercise

Vince with Monty Wolford, the man who apparently invented the sissy squat. Note the dramatic sweep of Wolford’s thighs

Welcome back to the OG, your one-stop shop for everything Vince Gironda. It’s been a few weeks since our last instalment, so let’s get straight back into it. We’ve been focusing on Vince’s approach to training individual body parts, and now it’s time for the legs. As a prelude to a deeper examination of his approach, let’s look at one exercise in particular: the famous sissy squat. This exercise is much misunderstood, and it’s anything but an exercise for sissies…

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The sissy squat is an exercise, like the guillotine press and the frog squat, that’s indelibly associated with Vince Gironda. But Vince didn’t actually invent the sissy squat. That was apparently Monty Wolford, a man you may not have heard of. Wolford called the sissy squat the “three-phase squat,” because it has… three phases. It was Vince, however, who popularised this kind of squat and dubbed it the “sissy squat.” He called it that not because it was an exercise for sissies, but because it would make you one.

Having performed sissy squats and similar variations in large volume, I can confirm this is, indeed, the case. I don’t think I’ve ever had a leg burn like it. A really heavy set of back squats may punish your body more overall, but they won’t set fire to your legs like sissy squats will. There’s no respite for your quads throughout the three movements. You just have to suck it up.

So why the sissy squat?

Vince hated back squats, as we’ve seen, because he thought they put too much emphasis on the glutes and widened the hips, with disastrous effects for whole-body proportion and symmetry. Remember, Vince wanted a perfect “v-taper”—that means wide shoulders and a narrow waist—but it’s important to note that the lower half of the body has work to do in achieving the v-taper as well. The width of the hips and the broad sweep of the thighs matter too. If your hips are wide and you have great thick thighs, that will throw off your proportions just as surely as having narrow shoulders or a wide waist.

Vince didn’t want to do anything to thicken either the hips or the thighs. Develop the thighs, sure, so that they have a a uniform thickness at the hip as at the kneed, but don’t thicken them so they detract from the v-taper.

This is where the sissy squat came in.

The basic idea of the sissy squat, besides avoiding the hip-widening effects of heavy weighted back squats, is to thicken the thigh muscles at the knee and in the middle, so that the whole leg has the same circumference. According to Vince, they would lend an illusion of greater length to the lengths, while maintaining the delicate balance of the v-taper.

Let’s look at how to perform the movement.