Leg Workout 3/29 Tom Platz Inspired

Hey Guys Yesterday was a great leg workout that my coach John Meadows gave me as part of one of his great programs. Recently, he got to go and train with one of his idols Tom Platz. If you don’t know who Tom is, look him up. He is legendary for having the greatest legs of…

Hey Guys Yesterday was a great leg workout that my coach John Meadows gave me as part of one of his great programs. Recently, he got to go and train with one of his idols Tom Platz. If you don’t know who Tom is, look him up. He is legendary for having the greatest Screen Shot 2014-03-30 at 12.09.15 PMlegs of all time. And if you think it was all genetics, think again. There’s rumors of him once squatting 500 pounds 50 times without putting the bar in the rack once. Check out the pic on the left. Crazy, huh? Well if this guy wants to give instruction on how to train legs, I’m all ears. Being three weeks out from a bodybuilding contest, I was already pretty depleted from the week. I had to really get pumped for this workout. Here’s the workout: Seated Hamstring Curls- we started off with 5 sets of 15 reps just to get the blood flowing. Normally, these would be hard sets but the plan was to come back to these later, so for now we were just filling the hams up with blood and warming the knees up for squats. Barbell Squats- The goal today was to do a bunch of warm up sets of 10 reps moving to sets of 8. We were to work explosively out of the bottom and pyramid up in weight until we got to a set that was a real grinder for 8 reps. Here’s what I did:

• 135 x 10 (warm up),
• 225 x 10 (warm up),
• 275 x 8 (warm up),
• 315 x 8 (warm up),
• 365 x 8 (work set),
• 405 x 8 (work set),
• 455 x 8 (work set) I lost speed here and was really tired after this set

8Hack Squats- On the hack squat we put our feet down really low on the platform, put our heels together and turned our toes out. When you get deep on this exercise, your knees travel out over your toes and you end up being on the balls of your feet (heels come up). This really kills the inner teardrop. In this position, there is no need to go heavy. After the warmups, we did 3 sets. The first was a 20 repper. The second was a set that went like this: 20 reps, stand up straight and take a deep breath, 10 more reps, another deep breath, then squat back down to the mid point and hold it there for 5 seconds wile a parter pushes down on the weight to make it hard. This is called an isotension hold and it is painful! We did 2 isotension holds on this set. After that rest a few minutes and do one more round. If you don’t have a hack squat, use the smith machine or any squat machine and put your feet forward a little bit

Here’s what we did:

• Set 1: +20 x 20 reps slow and smooth without locking out
• Set 2: + 45 x 20 + 10 + 2 x 5 second isotension holds with partner pushing down.
• Set 3: same as set 2

Leg Extensions- Moving on to leg extensions, we were to do sets of 20 again with the last 5 reps being partner assisted and then more isotension holds.

• Set 1- 20 reps
• Set 2- 15 reps + 5 partner assisted reps + 10 second hold
• Sets 3 and 4- 15 reps to failure + 5 forced reps + 10 second isotension hold.

Hamstring Curls again- Now we went back to the lying hamstring curl machine to work them for real. We did 2 sets of 20 reps to get them activated again. I have to say that the quads hurt more than the hams on this one from being so full and pushing them into the bench. Continuing on with the theme of isotension today, we had two more sets to do like this: 15 reps to failure, then 5 more partner assisted forced reps and then a 10 second hold at the midpoint.

• Set 1- 20 reps
• Set 2- up the weight for another 20 reps to failure
• Sets 3 and 4- 15 reps to failure + 5 forced reps + 10 second isotension hold.