@goliathliftzz: My basketball genetics are my biggest obstacle when it comes to leg development. Long legs make everything harder in bodybuilding 🤣 But overall, quad training seems like it should be pretty straightforward: Pick a squat variation, get as deep as you comfortably can, progressively overload it, throw in some leg extensions and call it a day. But why is that enough? Or why is that not enough? The quads are actually four different muscles: vastus lateralis, vastus medialis, vastus intermedius and rectus femoris. All four extend the knee! That’s one function common accross all the muscles. But there’s one important difference: Rectus femoris crosses the knee AND the hip, unlike any other quad muscle. With our exercise selection: Find a squat pattern that lets you achieve plenty of knee flexion, allows the knees to travel forward, keeps the movement comfortable and gives you enough stability to actually push the quads hard (Hack squat, pendulum, smith squat, leg press, barbell squats, etc). I’m much less interested in which one somebody crowned “optimal” and much more interested in whether YOU can create the mechanics we’re looking for and progressively get stronger at it. Because they’re all squat patterne, so they’re very similar tools to engage in the knee extension. But then we have rectus femoris, that we know crosses two joints. Here, something different happens during a squat: As the knee flexes, rectus femoris lengthens at the knee. At the same time, the hip flexes, which shortens it at the hip. Now compare that with leg extensions: The hip stays relatively fixed while the knee moves through flexion and extension. Here, we have a very simple way to directly load knee extension without the simultaneous hip movement happening during a squat. Longitudinal hypertrophy research has found that squat training can produce substantial growth in the vasti while producing comparatively little rectus femoris growth, whereas knee-extension training can produce substantially more growth of the rectus femoris. And that brings us back to the question from the carousel: Can two exercises actually be enough? Absolutely! If I have one squat pattern that I can load hard through meaningful knee flexion and one knee-extension exercise that fills the rectus femoris gap, I’ve already covered a huge amount of what I’m looking for from quad exercise selection. Could we add another squat variation, add unilateral work, rotate exercises…? Most definitely. But every additional exercise should answer one question: What is this giving me that I’m not already getting? Because a longer exercise list doesn’t automatically make a program more complete! Understand the anatomy, understand the function and stop searching for new exercises long enough to actually get stronger at the ones you picked. #biglegs #quadtraining #goliathliftzz #legworkout #trainhardorgohome Sources: Ema et al. (2013); Kubo et al. (2019); Fonseca et al. (2014); Kassiano et al. (2022).

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Thursday 10 September 2026 15:31:03 GMT