Trained legs with Randy Howard at Strength Beyond in Kalamazoo. It was my third leg day in five days, but I was still feeling pretty good. I can tell it's about to get rough though because my legs are really feeling beat up from this workout already and I have to be back in for another leg session tomorrow.
My expectations are that it's going to get really rough here over the next week or two before I make it over the "soreness hump" and things start to get easier again after a few weeks.
We'll see though....
For more detailed information on my legs EOD experiment check out www.MuscleMentor.net
Calves:
standing calf raise.
Four sets, 25 reps.
seated calf raise.
Three sets, fifteen reps.
Legs:
lying leg curls.
Six sets, twelve reps.
The last set of this was a triple drop set with partials instead of curls at the end.
hammer strength single leg leg press (We did both legs at the same time).
Three sets of twenty reps.
This exercise is really more of a warm up, something other than leg extensions to get some blood in the quads.
leg press.
five sets of twenty reps
one set of forty reps.
The last set of forty reps was with twelve 45's on each side so it was a pretty tough set. We did have the back rest up most of the way on the leg press which does give you a bit better bio-mechanical advantage, so it was slightly easier than it could have been. This set was brutal though. I'm really trying to make sure that I don't back off the intensity during this legs EOD experiment....and this set left me having trouble walking for a few minutes.
stiff leg dead lifts on the hack squat.
Three sets, fifteen reps.
I did these with a little bit wider stance than usual. I actually saw Kai Greene doing these and he had a much wider stance than I typically use so I tried it and I actually felt it quite a bit in my hamstrings, particularly the inside of my hamstrings in the semimembranosus particularly.
leg extensions.
Four sets, fifteen reps
The last set on this was a quadruple drop set for a total of about forty reps
lying concentration leg curls (We did these as a super set).
Two sets of twenty reps total (10 w/ chest elevated, 10 w/ chest on the pad).
The problem with these is that my quads were so filed with blood from the leg press and then the long drop set on leg extensions that I had trouble fully contracting my hamstrings. In the future I'll do the concentration leg curls earlier in the workout.
Squats (narrow stance, heels elevated on 10lb plates).
1x10 135lb
1x8 225lb
1x8 315lb
1x8 405lb
These were all done without a belt or knee wraps/straps. I was surprised how easy the set with 405lbs went up, especially considering it was somewhere around our 30th set for the day.
That's it--legs EOD day 3 is in the books. So far I've been able to maintain full intensity, volume, and weight throughout the workout. However, judging by how sore my legs are already feeling this morning I'm not sure how I'm going to keep that up much longer.
Part of the reason I'm doing this experiment is just because I felt like my training had gotten kind of unimpressive lately and I wasn't exactly taking pride in training hard like I used to...so actually getting my legs to grow better isn't the only goal of this. So, even though I would guess that backing off the volume/intensity a bit would probably be beneficial to growth here, I'm hoping to keep my intensity and volume high as much for mental reasons as anything.