Leg Day

Leg Day

In the last brief post I covered the basics of what I want to achieve, in this post I’ll cover todays training session, and tomorrows planned session and then at the weekend I’ll get round to laying out diet with macro’s etc. 

Today was legs day. I love training legs, but I hate the prospect the night before of having to get the workout done, if that makes any sense? There have been more than one time that I have thrown up during a legs session, or felt like throwing up after a legs session. Nothing quite smashes your CNS (central nervous system) like some heavy leg work and nothing drops lbs on the scales (for me at least) like a brutal leg session. 

Typically my training has always been about lifting the heaviest weight possible from point A to point B as many times as possible. Last year after my DVT and through the subsequent recovery I essentially had to drop all my weights back to beginner levels (I couldn’t even bench 60kg!) due to muscle wastage, which at the time was a real mental and ego blow. This turned out to be a really beneficial thing in the long run as I was able to build up the weights again using proper form and technique. It’s at about this time that I really started concentrating on the negative portion of every movement and lowering weight for a lot of movements to 3-4 second counts elongating the muscles time under tension. This leads to greater stress in the muscle and more stress ultimately equals more growth. In the last few weeks I’ve put much more focus and emphasis on the “mind muscle” connection and really squeezing the muscle. It’s a completely different challenge – true bodybuilding if you like, really sapping the strength and reps out of you.

Workout

Below is a write up of todays workout and some commentary around exercise selection and my thoughts around proper techniques follows. 

Whilst weights aren’t important, I’m going to lay them out so that progress can be tracked. 

AIM: Heavy Week – Ideally sets of 8-12 reps 

Warm Up - Seated Leg Raise – 50lb:25 reps, 60lb:25 reps 100lb:15 reps 
Smith Machine Squats – 50kg:15, 90kg:12 115kg:10 135kg: 8, 140kg: 6 
Leg Press – 270kg:12 x3 sets (slow 4 second negatives on this) 
Barbell Walking Lunges – 45kg x 8 strides each leg x3 sets 
Barbell Romanian Deadlift – 105kg x12; 105kg x10; 105kg x 10 
Seated Leg Curls (FST-7’s*) – 100lb:12, 100lb:12, 100lb:12, 100lb:10, 100lb:10, 100lb:8, 100lb:8 
Calf Raise Tri Set – 150kg on leg press x15 into 90kg seated x12 into bodyweight on step x10 (performed 3 times over with no rests and alternating foot position) 
Abs Superset 1: Cable Crunches with Laying Leg Drops and Walking Plate Twists x 3 Cable Wood Chops; 12 each side x 3 

Commentary: 

OK so the idea with the leg raises is that they are an exercise for this session to simply wake up the muscles and get some blood flowing in my quads and around my knees. You can see reps were high and weight low to moderate with strong squeezes at the top of the movement .

I use smith squats because it allows me to go heavier than barbell squats. Since the dislocation prior to my DVT episode last year I have not been able to barbell squat with any decent weight without severe discomfort in my knee. For one reason or another this doesn’t happen on smith squats, with the bonus of a) being able to place my feet slightly closer together b) being able to get my feet ever so slightly out in front of me further c) I can get much lower. Points A and B really allow me to use this move to hit the quads whilst point C allows the hams, glutes and hips to come in to play. At the top of the movement I refrain from completely locking out my legs keeping tension on my quads and then squeezing.

Leg press is an interesting one. Our gym maxes out at 320kg and I got to that stage earlier this year for 15 reps. I had to search for alternative ways to make leg pressing harder and have therefore adopted a 4 second negative on this. Its brutal stuff and I’ve been steadily working up from 200kg to 270kg. When I get back to 320kg I’ll drop the weight all the way back to 200kg and add a 2 second stop into the bottom of the movement… After that all I can do is keep adding more reps or change gyms!

Barbell walking lunges are a great move for legs. 45kg is the biggest short bar we have at the gym and the Olympic bar is too long to use without smashing it into stuff so I’ll have to start adding 2 extra steps per leg on this move. I do alternate with dumbbells so not too much of an issue. 

Barbell Rom Deadlift, for me, is the most under-rated and under-used movement, and unfortunately when I do see a few guys doing it their back is so round it makes me cringe. Key to this great move is to keep your chest up and your head forward and to do the negative nice and slow, and to only go as low as you need to whilst feeling it working. If you go too low or drop your head/chest it becomes a back move more akin to a rack pull. I found my grip was failing before my hams so now use hooks or straps to ensure it’s my legs that can’t take any more. I can add more weight to this move but 100kgish seems to be the sweet spot for getting that mind muscle connection – Any heavier and I just feel it in my lower back and this is not back day! 

FST-7 leg curls. These sort the men from the boys. This is a fancy new term coined by Neil Hill for “pump sets”. 7 sets of curls with only 30 second rests in-between each set. These fill your hams with so much blood you don’t know where to put yourself. To really make this work you need to relax your feet so that your toes point down and this then takes calves out the move. You also have to squeeze for 2-3 second counts at the top of the movement lowering to a 2-3 count. Yeeeouch.

Calf raises – your calf muscles are slightly different to most in the body in that they can fully recover from intense stress in 30 seconds or so. It makes sense when you think about it as they are worked with every step you take. Through trial and error volume work with short to no rests and big hard squeezes is where its at. I see a lot of guys training calves and they just get it all wrong. They don’t squeeze at all thinking its just about going from heel to toe (A to B philosophy), they perform the reps far too fast, they don’t rotate foot position to hit varying parts of the calf, they don’t hit up various available equipment (such as standing smith, incline leg press, standing on a block, seated raise, donkey raise etc) – again this restricts where and how you can hit the muscle, they don’t use anywhere near enough volume and they hit up 2minute plus rest periods which is just not necessary. Without sounding a tad arrogant its why they all have shit girly calf muscles with no definition, and why I have big defined vascular calf muscles. If you are going to train these muscles do it my way or just don’t fucking bother! If you hit these muscles properly you’ll know about it 48 hours later. If they don’t hurt and then some 48 hours later you have got it all wrong. 

Ab-wise I just want to hit a few various angles to hit, lower, side, obliques etc. I prefer super-setting abs so you can really fatigue them quickly. I want to feel them hurting to know they are working. I hadn’t ever seen more than a hint of my top 2 abs until earlier this year and that was achieved by just working them hard at least every other workout…. The good news is they are actually pretty thick-set so if I get to the conditioning I want to be in they should stand out pretty well. My only concern is my lower abs as I have some excess skin from the days of being 25stone and I don’t know how much I can shrink this back.

Tomorrow is a "day off", but only from weights. I'll still hit the gym, maybe laying in for an extra 30 minutes, and will hit up about 40 mins of steady-state cardio achieving a heart rate of 130-140bpm. I'll also hit up some abs and stretches and then its job done.

As part of my cutting diet I have 2 carb free days per week, both on non-workout days and tomorrow is therefore unfortunately a carb free day. It'll be a day filled with shed loads of egg whites and I'll be absolutely drained by the end of it.... but on Saturday morning I get the most special 6 hours of the week - more on that tomorrow though!