How to grow your legs (quad edition)
Nikola Man
Never skip leg day. Yes, today is finally the day we discuss building a massive pair of legs. Well, more specifically, we will be tackling the front part – the quadriceps.
In order to be able to design a training program for maximizing leg size, we have to understand their anatomy. The quadriceps femoris muscle is composed of 4 main muscles which you can see in the image below:
Vastus Intermedius is underneath Rectus Femoris
The 3 vastus muscles (lateralis, medialis and intermedius) serve one main function and that is knee extension. In other words, these muscles straighten the leg, imagine the movement you produce in the leg extension machine.
Lying on top of these 3 is the larger, meatier, rectus femoris. Similarly to the vastus group of muscles, it helps with extending the knee, but because it inserts higher up, on the hip bone it is a biarticular muscle, meaning that it works off of two joints. Its second function is hip extension.
Usually, this is the point where we start talking about volume, and we will in a bit, but first I’d like to touch upon exercise selection, progression and the best leg builder out there – the squat.
Picking the right exercise for you (is squatting necessary?)
The rectus femoris muscle usually has more type 2 fibers which means it responds better to heavier loads, and remember that’s the “meatiest” muscle of the bunch. With that information in mind, if I had to pick only one exercise to build quads I would chose the back squat because squats are an excellent movement which can be loaded quite heavily and are suitable for progression.
However, some people have knee problems or other structural issues which cause discomfort so it is by no means necessary to use the back squat as your main exercise. You can opt for the front squat, or the leg press or the hack squat. Whatever you find most comfortable, not in terms of training-induced pain but rather in terms of safety and bone health, pick that exercise and stick with it. Honestly, just find one that feels great for your quads and then start practicing the correct form with it first. Once you’ve mastered the form start doing plenty of that exercise and do it heavy. I will come back to this at the end.
Now it’s time for some volume:
Minimum volume (MV)
What’s the minimum volume you need to do to keep your quad size? Surprisingly, it’s rather low, just 6 heavy sets per week. What does that look like?
3 sets of squats on Tuesday, 3 sets of squats on Friday
or
3 sets of squats on Tuesday, 3 sets of leg presses on Friday
Minimum-effective volume (MEV)
How much work do you need to produce at least some growth? That volume sits around 8 sets of leg work per week on average. Again, it’s fairly easy to set this up:
4 sets of squats on Tuesday, 4 sets of squats on Friday
or
5 sets of squats on Tuesday, 3 sets of leg presses on Friday
Maximum recoverable volume (MRV)
MRV, for most people, tends to be around 20 sets per week. Generally, doing more than this increases the risk of injury, especially overuse injury. Trust me, you don’t want knee-related problems. Additionally, if your program is set up properly and you’re doing everything optimally (designed for the best growth) you simply will not be able to do more than 20 sets and still recover properly to function like a normal human being outside of the gym. Unless you are using steroids, but even then there’s a chance you’ll run into recovery and injury issues.
Intensity and frequency
As I already described above, quads respond well to high intensity (heavy weights) but what I did not talk about is that the 3 vastus muscles are usually an even split between type 1 and type 2 fibers which means that you should be using a variety of rep ranges. I suggest doing your main exercise heavy with 5 or 6 reps per set and doing the rest between 8 and 15 reps. Doing more than 15 can be useful if we incorporate metabolite training (remember last week’s biceps article). Obviously, when I give you a rep number or range I mean that those reps are done fairly close to failure per RIR (reps in reserve) scale.
As far as frequency goes, you should be doing anywhere between 1.5 and 3 sessions per week. We discussed the 0.5 session in the chest article but to summarize quickly, that is a lighter session. Essentially, you would do one very overloading session at the beginning of the week and another lighter session towards the end. I recommend this to people who already have massive quads because they will likely need a big stimulus to cause a disruption which will in turn cause an adaptation (growth). However, most people should be doing two fairly intense sessions a week.
Exercise selection
The first 5 exercises are the main, bread and butter, movements and you should have at least one in your program and use that one as the base of your program.
Tips for making a program
You can look at your leg training as a standard steak dish in a restaurant. Your big compound lifts are going to be the meat and all the other exercises can be the vegetable decoration you find on the side. Putting science and practice together, I suggest you do the following:
You make your first leg training day quadriceps-focused. This is where you put your favorite compound lift. For this example I’ll take the back squat. You do 4-8 sets of 5 or 6 reps, meaning that you go fairly heavy. Here you would also add some calf, gluteus and hamstring exercises and you also add 2-3 sets of a lighter quad exercise like the leg extension machine or lunges which you do for 10-15 reps.
Your second leg training session should place the emphasis on your glutes and your hamstrings. However, this article is all about quads so they are the only ones I will touch upon here. You either pick another compound lift and do it for 3-5 sets for 8-12 reps or you do the same main movement from the first session but with a lighter load so that you can get 8-12 reps and you do it for 3-5 sets. So in this example, you did squats on the first day, here you can do the leg press or do squats again but with a lighter weight. You can throw in another lighter exercise, say goblet squats for additional 2-3 sets which you do for 10-15 reps.
I suggest starting at the lower end of the set ranges above and adding sets each week or when possible. I also suggest adding weight when possible, because the ultimate goal is to keep increasing weight over time.
Just to quickly recap volumes, at the lower end you would be doing 4 sets of squats and 2 sets of leg extensions in the first session and 3 sets of either leg presses or squats and 2 sets of goblet squats in the second session. That gives you a total of 11 weekly sets which is just above the MEV above. At the top end you would be doing 19 sets which is near the 20 set mark i.e. close to your MRV.
Other important comments
There are two things that people usually debate when it comes to squats – depth and stance width. Let’s tackle depth first, you should always be striving to squat as deep as you comfortably can. Again, comfort has nothing to do with muscle pain, I am merely talking about injury prevention. Parallel is something you should be aiming towards and if possible you should go deeper than that. As far as stance is concerned, EMG activity studies show practically identical quad activation across all stance widths so you should squat with the stance that feels best for you. Minor note, gluteus activation seems to be greater with a wider stance.
Coming back to the discussion we started before the volume talk. Namely, I’d like to highlight two reasons why proper form is important here. One is injury prevention (safety) and the other is the engagement of muscles. Safety-wise, if you have knee problems, consider going for the front squat, if you have low back pain, consider going for the leg press. In terms of muscle activation, all I will say is that the better the form the better the muscle fiber recruitment and the more you get out of the exercise. Your muscles don’t know how many plates you’ve put on the bar, they know how many plates they are lifting and crappy form can let you lift more weight in total but lower weight with the targeted muscle, so keep that in mind.
The last thing I’ll mention is exercise diversity. Many people, wrongly, think that they need to do a bunch of different exercises and a ton of sets each leg session. You see people doing back squats for 3-4 sets, then hack squats for another 3-4 sets, then the leg press for 3-4 sets, then leg extensions for 2-4 sets and then a huge drop set on lunges. You really do not need that much variety within a workout. In fact, you do not need that much variety within a week. Stick to 1-2 compound exercises and try to progress on those both in terms of sets and weight. This will do wonders for your quads. Consider the following, why is it that powerlifters often (almost always) have enormous quads? It is simply because they stick to their squats and the goal of their sport is to lift more weight.
One of my mentors and main sources of information and inspiration