How to build tree trunk legs
For growth on the legs I would personally do quads on one day, and hamstrings on a separate day. The calves are the hardest muscle to grow in the legs and they will recover quickly, so I would train them on both days.
This piece of advice is for your quad day, to hit the quads hard straight away in the warm up, pump up the muscles and start building the muscle all at once.
Make sure you keep good form throughout, and focus on getting the full range of motion once you start to feel the ‘burn’ as you will be tempted to shorten reps if you feel like you will struggle to get to the target number.
You will be doing a pyramid down in reps and back up again (50, 40, 30, 20, 10, 10, 20, 30, 40, 50) on the leg press machine.
Start out light for the first working set, the 50 reps, and after each set add weight until you reach your heaviest set – the 10 rep set. Make sure you don’t go too heavy with the weight, as you want to make sure you reach the 10 reps, but try and make it a struggle to get there to get the most out of the exercise. From there, work your way back, lowering the weight each time and seeing if you can get back to 50 reps.
I would do this to start off my quad day, and after this move into whichever training style I would be using for the session.
When you are putting your quads through an intense workout, it is important to mention that your hamstring training has to be on the same level. There are lots of examples of people letting their hamstrings fall behind their quads and becoming injury prone because of this – footballers for example, who regularly pull their hamstrings through the season because of such heavy quad dominance.
