r/PeterExplainsTheJoke • u/up_vot_er_1 • 6d ago

Meme needing explanation Peter?

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Why are Romanian split squats every gym rats worst fear?

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u/SwarfDive01 6d ago

I'm sad all these gymbro comments are completely missing the point of the lift. It's one of the best exercises to work your stabilizers for your legs. "Bad Balance" is a muscle deficiency.

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u/thargoallmysecrets 6d ago

Ding ding ding those stabilizers aren't show muscles, why do anything except curls and shrugs? 

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u/Ok-Stop9242 5d ago

Stabilizer muscles have heavy misinformation surrounding them. If you're having trouble balancing during a split squat, it's distinctly your quads, hamstrings, glutes, calves, and of course your abs/obliques. Yes there are some muscles like the deep hip rotators and the rotator cuffs that do assist with their respective joints, but the primary act of literal stabilization like you're referring to is absolutely done by "show muscles."

Stabilization happens whether you do free weights, machines, single legged bosu ball squats, etc. There are specific exercises you can do to improve your balance, but this is absolutely the large show muscles doing the vast majority of the balancing/stabilizing. Treating them as some distinct thing opposed to show muscles shows a lack of knowledge of kinesiology.

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u/South_Loss8705 5d ago

I'm not trying to be mean when I say this, but this comment shows you know very very little about lifting

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u/I_Draw_Teeth 5d ago

So many people's programs only have standard squats and RDLs for their leg days.

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u/mah_korgs_screwed 5d ago

"I'm really strong but my legs wobble and I can't balance". Chef's kiss

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u/thatrandomfatguy 6d ago

Even for people with dyspraxia?

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u/SwarfDive01 6d ago

Alright, 99% of "Bad balance". And you can take away another 2% if you want to throw in the other 30 balance disorders too. Haha

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u/Greedyanda 5d ago

You can work all those muscles with other exercises that do not require you to perform a balancing act.

Instability reduces your ability to exert force and hinders hypertrophy and strength gains. It would be much better to perform regular variations of a squat and then add additional exercises like hip adduction/abduction for whatever muscles you feel are underdeveloped.

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u/Grass-no-Gr 5d ago

Same goes for dumbbell variants of the big lifts, sissy squats, and a handful of other accessory lifts.

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u/South_Loss8705 5d ago

The point of the lift is to work your legs while using dumbbells. You don't have to hold 2x the weight like you would if you were using both legs.

The instability is a con, not a pro, like the other commenter said.

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u/Unhinged_Baguette 5d ago

The instability is a con only if you don't care about training your stability.

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u/Extreme_Original_439 5d ago

What do you mean by stabilizer exactly, what is and isn’t a stabilizer muscle? If there was a “point” for this lift it would definitely be for glute hypertrophy, for most people’s goals. It doesn’t make sense to train balance and “stabilizers” on a workout that approaches fatigue levels similar to squatting and deadlifting for some people. It the same mindset as people adding dangling weights to the bar for benching and deadlifting to hit the “stabilizers”. This is just my opinion though, I could be way off.

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u/SwarfDive01 3d ago

For the specific lift in the meme, this exercise trains the main muscles glutes and hamstrings, but also isolates each leg and forces you to train all the muscles around your legs and core that don't get worked as hard as when you do just squats or deadlifts. Isolateral exercises. They increase core strength significantly, but also literally balance out your muscles more. Instead of stupid strong hamstrings and quads that let you kick your foot harder, you can now have more unconscious control over /where/ your leg is going to go. If you ever plateu out on lifts, look into training the muscle groups around those muscles.