The only thing that comes to my mind is that my knees had time to heal and that this issue would spring up again had I continued doing pistols. I normally don’t do any sort of squatting movement that deep – the deepest I go, on back squats, is still a lot higher than this literal ATG I do on pistols.

Hmm, very interesting indeed- do you think you might have had some underlying issue back then which was corrected by the time of your last trip?

Generally, yes, as it feels the most natural.

However, a while ago, when I was still doing them on a regular basis, my knees would sometimes ache a bit if going all the way down. It was a momentary pain, not a persistent one, and a fairly mild one as well, but I decided to play it safe, so I cut the ROM by two, maybe three inches, and it worked out fine.

Interestingly enough, last time I did them (on this vacation of mine), I had no problems doing them full ROM, despite doing 60 of them daily.

That’s awesome! And you go down with pistols like, hams touching calves?

Sure, but that requires: a) having gymnastic rings, and b) having some place to suspend them from, the latter being more difficult, especially when traveling. I wanted to keep things simple here, but if there’s one piece of equipment that you could take along with you to train, it would be rings (I’m not a fan of carrying weights while traveling or anything similar). 🙂

The only thing I actually needed to learn is to overcome the fear of falling backwards at the bottom position, and I did that by going outside and practicing my pistols on the grass. Granted, I fell more times than I’m ready to admit, but it also gave me a lot more room to practice.

Initially, by practicing once or twice a week, I was able to overcome all difficulties (tight hams, poor ankle flexibility, valgus collapse and lack of balance) in about a month. Nowdays I don’t do pistols regularly in my training, so when attempting them again (like on this vacation), it takes me about a day or two of practicing to get the groove back.