When 
you start building a house, what is the most important part? The foundation. How about when you build your physique? What’s the most important part? Again, the answer doesn’t change – it’s the foundation, a.k.a. your legs. Without an adequate base, most athletes will be hard pressed to get the strength and power needed throughout the rest of their body as many exercises and routines require powerful legs. There tends to be a common theme here; if your foundation is weak, your upper body won’t be able to reach its potential either.
If you do not like working legs then you probably need to do more legwork! If you hate doing work for your midsection, then you probably need to do more work for your midsection. Pretending that the rules do not apply to you is a surefire recipe for disaster. Balance is the key and is a critical component of effective high volume training.
Similar to just about anything in life, getting bigger, stronger, and building an aesthetic physique requires dedication, persistence, and lots of hard work. However, hard work is not enough. To win the war, to create your best physique possible you have to have the right strategy. You have to know how to execute the right plan at the right time and see it through to the end. While high volume leg training is not for the novice athlete and is not for everyone, I believe it is necessary and provides great benefits for advanced physique athletes and bodybuilders to add overall size and strength.
High volume leg training is, of course, not the only effective method of training legs. However, it is a form of training that needs to be applied at some point to build upon a successful foundation, and in so doing take your training to the next level. Are you stuck in a rut, doing the same exercises, with similar sets and reps week after week? Have you plateaued? Get ready to bust through, explode your leg development and take your intensity and pump up quite a few levels…
Legs
are your most important muscle to develop. Never neglect your legs!
Build your “house” on a solid foundation and it will withstand the test of time. Build it upon a foundation of sand, and it will crumble at some point. To stand with the best, most aesthetic physiques in the world, there is no way around it, your foundation will become key. Sure, the current state of Men’s Physique competitions does not allow us as athletes to showcase our hard work and our reinforced foundation a.k.a. leg development. But understand, what we do get to showcase – including our overall aesthetics – is, in fact, related to what you have developed in your lower body.
When we train legs, we are after that skin-splitting pump. The best way to obtain the most effective pumps is to use high volume with heavy weights. Forget about doing hundreds of pushups to get a pump. That is not what we are after. We want pumps from heavy weight for maximum muscle growth.
A good leg training program should consist of some compound and isolation exercises. Legs are a big muscle group, so doing high volume (not less than 30 total sets for quads and hams) to me is important to hit different areas of the legs for complete development.
When I train, I am of the mindset, “The Harder the Better”. If it is easy then you need to up the weight and or the number of reps. Trying out different exercises over the years and choosing the ones that works best for me while incorporating high volume training along with throwing in some new exercises has allowed me to shock my legs into new growth.
For hamstrings, the stiff leg deadlift is a must, as this is the meat and potato exercise for building mass, shape and detail. Try and work every angle with a variety of leg exercises for complete leg development. Continually switch up your routine, and keep you legs guessing and in a constant state of growth. Every now and then, perform single leg movements to better concentrate the emphasis on each limb and increase the intensity of training.
Always stretch thoroughly before starting you leg session and continually stretch your quads and hams between sets for faster recovery. Also, know that stretching elongates the muscle tissues and thus is important for competitive bodybuilders and physique athletes because the transformation between the flexed and un-flexed muscles is more dramatic (muscles pop out when flexed)!
Here is an example of a routine that I have incorporated and found to work well:
Welcome to IntensityVille! Buckle in for the superset or giant set ride if you think you are ready.
Leg Extensions: 1 x 20 (Warm up) 1x15/1x15/1x15 – 1x25 (drop set)
Lying Leg Curls: 1 x 20 (Warm up) 1x15/1x15/1x15 – 1x25 (drop set)
Leg Press (Hammer Strength): 1x20/1x20/1x20 *(Feet High & Wide)
Leg Press (Sled): 1x15/1x15/1x15 *(Feet Low and Close)
Dumbbell Stiff Leg Deadlifts: 1x15/1x15/1x15
Leg Press (Hammer Strength): 1x20/1x30/1x50 *(Feet middle and close)
**Descending weight as reps i.e. 8 plates per side, 6 plates per side, 4 plates per side
Free Motion Squat Machine: 1x20/1x20/1x15
Cable Front Squat a.k.a. – Water Skis: 1x15/1x15/1x15
Walking Lunges: 15 steps each foot (Up and back) 3 sets
Squat (Bodyweight) Floor touches: 2 x 100 (Failure)
All the above, as you can see, are supersets or a giant set, and the rest period between your sets should be 30-60 seconds max. With all the exercises each set is performed with ascending weight up to our max for each. i.e. Leg Extensions – last set is the stack for 15 then a drop set for an additional 25 reps. You want to put everything you have into every rep.
Initially, you will feel like you’re going to die. Hang in there! Over the course of several weeks, you will get better at surviving this workout.
There you have it; a 60-minute leg thrashing session where you have performed 30 sets and should encounter a leg engorging pump while having a grand old time walking to your car!
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