Serious Leg Training for Building Killer Quads without Heavy Squat Exercises
( Now it's Possible to Gain Massive Legs without Suffering with Squats - fitFlex Articles - Learn, Share and Discover! ) ..
We all know that heavy barbell squats are the fastest ticket to huge thighs. Be that as it may, not all of us can do them safely. For those
of us with lower back problems (and this encompasses a very large group), deep squats done with a heavy bar on your back can be akin to playing
Russian roulette. You never know when you'll go down for another rep and blow out your back coming back up. It would seem that your choices are
to either persist in tempting fate with heavy squats or abandon all hopes of ever building thighs with enough meat on them to hang off the bone.
Luckily, when it comes to bodybuilding training, there's always more than one way to do it. I've come across several methods for keeping the
quad gains coming without puffing my lower back at risk.
Pre-exhaust with Leg Extensions
Leg extensions are commonly regarded as a means of warming up the knees before you do heavy pressing movements, so they're often performed with
light weight and high reps. But you can also use leg extensions to pre-exhaust the quadriceps so that you need less weight on the pressing movements
to follow, and you achieve the same growth-stimulating effects. Start with a couple of light warmup sets, but then go ahead and do three or four
tough work sets to failure, using more weight and fewer reps on each consecutive set. An example might be 200 pounds for 20 reps, 250 for 15 and a
third set with 300 pounds for 10 reps. That will ensure that your quads fatigue before your hamstrings and glutes when you follow up with squats or
leg presses, and you should require only about 60 to 80 percent of the usual weight to hit failure within your desired rep ranges.
A Press is a Press
Don't fall for the myth that barbell squats are the only pressing movement that can pack size onto your thighs; it's just not true. Hard work on leg
presses, hack squats or Smith-machine squats can certainly build muscle too. Having to balance a bar on your traps as you do knee bends means that
squats are the hardest in terms of the weights you can handle. So it may take 800 pounds on a leg press to work the legs as hard as 300 pounds on
squats, but the result should be the same. Plenty of great legs have been built using pressing movements other than the barbell squat; don't think
it can't be done.
Squat Later in the Workout
Of course, it would be wise to keep squats in your leg program for best results. The smart way to do that is to do them at the end of your workout
so that you need far less weight. I like to do leg extensions, heavy leg presses or hacks, then walking dumbbell lunges and, only after all of those,
barbell squats. All it takes at that point is a couple of very strict sets of 15 deep reps with a mere 225 on the bar to put the final blowtorch to my
quads. And honestly my legs look much better now than they did a few years ago, when I was squatting 500 pounds and injuring my lower back on a regular
basis.
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