Diary 19/06/10 - The new leg training...

... and it is a good one! After all the amendments I had made, today was the first time that I worked through the whole thing in the right order- or at least through what I thought the right order should be - and I could not run to my car despite rather heavy rain: That is what I call muscle exhaustion.

Squat, deadlift & Co
I had added deadlifts a while ago, but had put them at the end of the training, with the idea in mind that after the leg press, which was the main leg exercise and came first, I would be too exhausted to do deadlifts straight away. So doing all the other stuff inbetween would give the main muscle some rest before it gets involved in the next exercise. This allows it to survive longer and hence all the supportive muscles get the opportunity to be trained very well. Not a bad idea and it generally works for all exercises that involve muscle groups rather then isolated muscles, like bench press, deadlifts, squats.

Right now this theory has one flaw, though: My main muscle, the glutes, are weak. So my worry should not lie with the smaller supportive muscles but with the main one. And that means to kill it well and good!

So today I set out to do just that. Last week already I had decided to add squats to the program as well, as there is nothing better to build glutes than squats.

Squats as well as deadlifts are exercises which cannot be done to full exhaustion of the muscle, though; one needs to stay in control of the weight in order to not topple over or to get injured. The idea now was to do the exhausting and control demanding exercises at the beginning and use the machines to finish it off.

Thus squats came first... still only 30kg, but felt good and controlled... and then deadlifts. The efficiency of the squats showed instantly as I had to reduce the weight of the deadlifts from 80 to 70kg and if felt really, really heavy.

But good! That's what we want, we want those glutes to give in and not being able to move anymore. Given that, the weight of the deadlift doesn't matter as long as the target muscle is hit!

Next the leg press on my usual machine (cable). Had to reduce the weight by 1 1/2 plates and it was awfully heavy. That firstly shows that so far the leg press did a good job by hitting the right muscle, and that secondly it is a great tool to finish off what the squats and the deadlifts had started. I never felt wobblier on my legs when clambering from that thing.

After that all the other exercises followed: Leg extension were affacted and I needed to reduce weight; hamstring curl was amazingly good, pobably by then there was enough resting time between the deadlifts and those curls; then came calves and adductor and abductor muscles on the machine.

And now I am pretty happy that I can sit here and write, although I should be in the garden weeding... I just don't feel like bending over right now.