Hamstring Emphasis Leg Day
Notes on leg training
My leg training has not been up to par or my standards since December of 2016 so for over a year now. I am not one to talk about negative things but just so you guys have some context to why I am doing what I am doing. In November of 2016 my leg training was at a peak for me, I went for a hack squat the end of the month that I should have waiting a few more weeks on and basically gave myself a level of tendonitis in both patellar tendons as well as lateral mal tracking of the patella in my left knee (this is still not fixed) . Any type of loading of my knee hurt and was causing visible inflammation so I took Jan and Feb of 2017 off from training legs. Coming back things just did not seem right basically long story short I have had zero internal rotation in my hips which is causing excess stress on my knees hence why I suffered the initial injury so I have some good weeks, then some bad weeks and due to over compensating for bad motor patterns I have also had some adductor strains on my left side as well that I have had to work around. That being said I was able to get some really good joint work done by John Quint last week so things are improving and my goal for now is to train my legs in order to be able to string together successful session after successful session without any set backs. I am not training them as all out with heavy loading throughout like on all my upper body session but what I am doing is aiming to load heavy at the beginning after a lot of warming up (if my legs allow) and then do more blood volume type work at the end to train some motor patterns that are just generally weak right now or undertrained just from my extended time off / working around issues.
Due to this I am trying to load quads on both days to get my left side back up to par so that way my legs can be progressing at a similar rate rather than playing catch up.
This is how today went…I am going to be stringing together these movements so that you guys will be able to track progress weekly!
**Only working sets show, I will be showing how I work up to warm up sets on my videos!
1 – Banded Leg Press with a low foot placement (1 inch and 1/4 inch band added to both sides.)
Worked up to a max effort set with 8 plates a side x 15 reps
***The leg press serves as a warm up as well I am doing a lot of sub max sets here starting out with just the bands added to the platform and no plates and then working up from there.
2 – Lying leg curl – driving my hip flexors into the pad throughout.
(Remember when you are training hamstrings a hamstring is intended to do both knee flexion and hip extension you need to be doing both!)
110 x 6.5 – 2 – 1 + 6 partials
3 – Barbell RDL
Max set of 495 x 5
4 – Bulgarian Split Squat
35lb x 10 reps each leg (this was light but with my knee mal tracking I am working on getting the muscles surrounding my knee strong again through some iso lateral work)
5 – Lying DB Curl on Floor (Again driving my hips into floor, hard isometric contraction on adductors throughout)
40lb x 8
35lb x 8
6 – Straight leg cable Adductor
40lb x 10
40lb x 9
***I place my feet through nylon D handles with the base of the cable machine at the floor, I have a bench set in the middle of the cable station and set back a bit so that the cable pull can stay in a stright line. I am adducting both cables at the same time.
7 – Lying Leg Curl Single Leg
40lb x 10
