[quote]Eightman wrote:
FightingScott wrote:
Hey FightingScott
I don’t ever post, often just read but am seriously interested in what sort of program or protocol you used with the above and your leg training. How good do you think your results were and what improvements would you make if you had your time over?
Really interested as after two ACL reconstructions and a lot of time off I am finally getting myself to a position to decently train my legs. I hope to really improve them, add some size and strenght because from my starting point they were terrible. Anyway sorry for the hijack but I am currently using squat, split squat, leg press and front squat predominantly for my quads. So there is a parallel here for me
Thanks[/quote]
I’ve never had any knee problems but I’ll tell you what’s worked for me in the past.
This summer I saw a YouTube Video of Stefan Havlik (some big-time French Bodybuilder) working out legs. His workout was more high volume that what I’d been doing for legs. I changed some of the exercises and came up with this workout that I would do for leg size. I would do 1 warm-up set with the bar for 15 reps and 1 warm-up set with 135 before I went to work. I feel that mentally, your warm up set should have more reps than your working sets so you’ll be less inclined to quit in the middle of a set. I would pyramid the weight each set.
-Olympic Back Squat 15-12-10-8
-Barbell Bulgarian-Split Squat
-Romanian Deadlift 15-15-15
-Leg Press 10-10 (After completing 10 reps, do 10 high knee jumps. I usually only got to 8. This should be pretty killer)
-Leg Curl 8-8-8
-Seated Calf Raise 15-15-15
-Smith Machine Standing Calf Raise 15-15-15
This helped me put on a lot of weight, size and strength. I’d do it twice a week. I tried to PR in the Back Squat and Romanian Deadlift whenever possible and just did the other exercises for blood volume.
Now I don’t really have the physical capital to do shit like this since it’s Dual-Meet Swim-Season so I do this:
-Monday: Front Squat 8X3
-Unilateral Leg Movement (Lunge, Split Squat, or Step-up) 2X6 reps per leg
-Posterior Chain (Leg Curl, 45’ Hyper, Romanian Deadlift, etc) (3X8-15)
-Heavy Abs (3-4X15-25)
Thursday:
-Good Morning, Deadlift, or Squat Variation Max Effort (Work up to 3RM and PR every Thursday. Cycle the Max Effort movement of choice every 3 weeks mainly to prevent boredom)
-Unilateral Leg Movement (Lunge, Split Squat, or Step-up) 2X6 reps per leg
-Posterior Chain (Leg Curl, 45’ Hyper, Romanian Deadlift, etc) (3X8-15)
-Light Abs (2X50)
There was a point where at the end of Tuesday and Thursday I would do the Cybrex Leg Press for 1 set of 20 reps and I’d add a plate to each side of the machine every workout. I think this helped me add some detail pretty quickly and I was able to move up to doing as many plates as the machine would allow for 19 reps last week.
But now that I’ve accomplished that I’m just going to put more volume into my single leg movements instead. The only reason I was training the leg press like this was to prove to a prick on my team that I could leg press twice his 10RM for twice the reps he could do.
I expect that I’ll be able to continue adding size now that my unilateral leg movement is the barbell back lunge. I had been doing Bulgarian Split Squats for maybe a month and had worked my way up to doing 100 lbs in each hand. I noticed that I wasn’t really doing these with one leg so much that I was squatting with my forward leg and dong a lex extension with my rear leg when the weight got that heavy. If you do split squats, make sure you’re aware of this.