Leg Workout Thursday 16th April 2009
First up for my legs today was the leg press. I’m not really going heavy on the leg press at the moment, I’m instead, focusing on doing three good sets of twelve reps, and each week putting up the weight by 10kg. This is so that I achieve progressive overload on the legs, by increasing the weight consistently each week. I know I can already bash out a set at the machine’s heaviest weight, but the form is probably not great, so by doing it this way, I’m forcing my legs to get stronger.
I did a couple of warmup sets, just 80kg and 100kg, just to get the blood pumping and make sure the muscles were warmed up. Did a few stretches after my warmup sets before going into my three working sets.
- 140kg x 12 reps
- 140kg x 12 reps
- 140kg x 12 reps
That was it for my leg press, next up was hamstring curls. I don’t really enjoy hamstring curls, but I do them anyway as I don’t want to have over-developed quads and nothing on the hamstrings. For a start it would look weird, but more importantly, it’d probably lead to knee problems which I don’t want!
- 62.5kg x 10 reps
- 62.5kg x 10 reps
- 62.5kg x 10 reps
After hamstring curls, I did leg extensions, I increased the weight from last week, so opted to just aim for three sets of 10 reps. I read a useful article on the Muscle hack website about progressive overload training, and it states that if you can do more reps than you aim for, don’t because you can do them the following week, and therby allow you body to be progressively overloaded - ie, always doing more each workout, even if it’s just another rep for each set at the same weight, that’s more work for the muscles than the previous week.
- 72.5kg x 10 reps
- 72.5kg x 10 reps
- 72.5kg x 10 reps
That was it for my leg workout, I was fairly pleased with it, as I had made some progress on all the exercises from the previous week, and it’s always nice to get legs out of the way for another week!
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