A skater squat is a single-leg squat where you lower yourself on one leg while your other leg hovers behind you, with your back knee lightly tapping a pad or the floor at the bottom. Unlike a lunge, the back leg doesn’t push off the ground or share the load. Your front leg does nearly all the work, making this one of the more challenging bodyweight leg exercises you can do.
How the Movement Works
Start by standing on one leg with your foot flat on the floor and your hips facing forward. Place a small pad or yoga block behind your heel as a target for your back knee. Your non-working leg stays slightly behind you with the knee bent, toes barely touching the floor or hovering off it entirely.
From there, push your hips back and down into a single-leg squat. Your front knee should track in line with your middle toes, and your back knee travels toward the pad behind you. At the bottom, your back knee lightly taps the pad without any push-off from that leg. To stand back up, drive through the middle of your front foot and squeeze your glute at the top. Keeping your arms extended in front of you like a counterweight helps with balance throughout the movement. Aim for 5 to 10 controlled reps per leg.
The key distinction is that hovering back leg. In a Bulgarian split squat, your rear foot rests on a bench and contributes some force. In a skater squat, the back leg is only there for balance. This puts the full demand on one leg at a time, which is what makes the exercise so effective and so humbling the first time you try it.
Muscles Targeted
Skater squats load the quads, glutes, and hamstrings of the working leg, but with a twist compared to other single-leg exercises. Because you hinge your hips back more than you would in a pistol squat, the movement emphasizes the glutes and hip muscles to a greater degree. Your quads still work hard to control the descent and drive you back up, but the hip-dominant pattern means your glutes and hamstrings share more of the load.
Your core fires throughout the entire movement to keep you from tipping sideways or rotating. The stabilizer muscles around your knee and ankle also get significant work, since you’re balancing your full bodyweight on a single foot with no external support. This stabilizer demand is a big part of what makes skater squats valuable beyond raw strength building.
How Skater Squats Differ From Pistol Squats
People often lump these two exercises together as “advanced single-leg squats,” but they challenge the body in different ways. In a pistol squat, you drop straight down with your non-working leg extended in front of you. This creates deep knee flexion and demands serious ankle mobility. If your ankles are stiff from old injuries or just your natural joint structure, pistol squats may never feel right.
Skater squats are more forgiving on the ankles because you send your hips back rather than dropping straight down. That hip hinge shifts the stress away from the ankle joint and toward the hips and glutes. You can think of it this way: a pistol squat is more quad-dominant, while a skater squat is more hip-dominant. Neither is better in absolute terms, but the skater squat is accessible to a much wider range of body types and mobility levels.
Why It’s Worth Adding to Your Training
Training one leg at a time exposes and corrects strength imbalances between your left and right sides. Most people have a dominant leg that compensates during bilateral exercises like back squats, and they never realize it until they try something like a skater squat. Working each leg independently forces both sides to develop evenly.
The balance and coordination demands carry over directly to sports that involve sprinting, cutting, and lateral movement. Basketball, tennis, hockey, and soccer all require you to decelerate and change direction on one leg, which is essentially what the skater squat trains. The exercise also strengthens the muscles surrounding the knee joint, particularly the quads and hamstrings, in a way that helps stabilize the knee during those high-speed movements.
For people who train at home or travel frequently, skater squats solve the problem of how to get a challenging leg workout without heavy equipment. Most people who can barbell squat their bodyweight will still find the skater squat difficult.
Common Form Mistakes
The most frequent error is letting the knee collapse inward as you descend. This inward drift, called knee valgus, puts stress on the ligaments of the knee rather than the muscles you’re trying to train. The fix is simple: actively push your knee outward so it stays aligned with the direction your toes are pointing. Cueing yourself to think “knee out” or “knee apart” as you lower down usually corrects this immediately.
Another common issue is letting the chest fall forward excessively. Some forward lean is natural and expected in a hip-hinge pattern, but if your torso drops toward the floor, you lose tension in your legs and put unnecessary stress on your lower back. Keep your ribs pulled down and your spine neutral throughout the movement.
The third mistake is using the back leg to push off the ground at the bottom. This defeats the purpose of the exercise. Your back knee should touch the pad like you’re resting an egg on it, not stomping on it to generate momentum. If you can’t stand back up without pushing off the back leg, you need a regression (more on that below).
How to Scale the Difficulty
Making It Easier
If you can’t yet reach the floor with your back knee, stack a few foam pads or yoga blocks on the ground behind you. Tapping a higher target reduces the range of motion and makes the movement manageable while you build strength. As you get stronger over weeks, remove one pad at a time until your knee reaches the floor.
Another option is holding onto a resistance band looped around a pull-up bar or sturdy anchor point. The band takes some of your bodyweight, letting you practice the full range of motion with assistance. A TRX or suspension trainer works the same way.
Using a Counterbalance
Holding light dumbbells in front of you with arms extended does something counterintuitive: it actually makes the squat easier, not harder. The weight shifts your center of mass forward, which lets you sit back deeper without losing your balance. Even two-pound dumbbells can make a noticeable difference. There’s no need to go above about 15 pounds, since the dumbbells are serving as a counterweight, not adding resistance. Going heavier just fatigues your shoulders without making the exercise more productive for your legs.
Making It Harder
Once you can do 10 clean reps per leg to the floor, you can increase the challenge by holding a heavier dumbbell or kettlebell in a goblet position against your chest. You can also slow the descent to a three or four-second count, which eliminates any momentum and increases time under tension. Removing the knee pad entirely and hovering at the bottom without touching adds another layer of difficulty, since you lose the tactile feedback that tells you when to reverse the movement.