On April 21, 2022, bodybuilder Breon Ansley shared a demanding leg workout that seemingly asked everything of his lower body on his YouTube channel. At the same time, he revealed that his next competition would be the 2022 Tampa Pro, which will take place on August 5-6, 2022, in Tampa Bay, Florida. 

Recently, Ansley detailed his decision to retire from the Classic Physique Division following the 2022 Classic Physique Olympia. Notably, Ansley maintained that he would change aspects of his upcoming training with a new “master plan.” The idea behind the new plan was to allow him to leave the division at his best.

As Ansley clarifies in his recent video, this leg workout is a part of that vision. Here’s a peek at one of Ansley’s first public steps on the road to his final Classic Physique Olympia competition.

Ansley’s Legs Workout

Ansley opens by offering a disclaimer that this routine is about a focus on high volume rather than lifting staggering amounts of weight. Nonetheless, he seemingly can’t hold in his excitement, saying, “We’re gonna make the intensity crazy.” 

Leg Extension & Lying Hamstring Curl

• Leg Extension: 2 x 6 | 1 x 10
• Lying Hamstring Curl: 1 x 6 | 1 x 7 | 3 x 8

Ansley wastes no time establishing a rapid pace by super-setting leg extensions and lying hamstring curls. He says that he limits rest between sets to optimize the results. 

30 seconds, 40 seconds, that’s about it. That’s all we need. 

Research backs up Ansley’s assertion. One study showed that athletes who integrated supersets into their strength training saw significant gains in training efficiency and metabolic activation over a relevant time period.

However, someone like Ansley is a seasoned professional. By that same token, it was important for those with less experience not to overdo their limited rest, super-setting as it could lead to unnecessary fatigue and eventual muscle damage. (1)

Smith Machine Squat & Bodyweight Bulgarian Split Squat

• Smith Machine Squat: 2 x 5 | 1 x 9
• Bodyweight Bulgarian Split Squat: 1 x 9 | 1 x 11 | 1 x 15

Ansley turns to another superset, splitting his time between squats on the Smith machine and bodyweight Bulgarian split squats. He continues to praise the merits and benefits of supersets in the process. 

“We love to make it the most difficult we possibly can,” Ansley says. “When we make it that challenging, that means our body looks that much better, looks that much more powerful. The more challenging you make it, the more ‘wow factor’ you have.”

That aside, Ansley might have utilized the Smith machine squats rather than the traditional barbell variation because of one specific distinction. Balance and stabilization are lesser concerns on the Smith machine in contrast to a free weight lift, letting an athlete freely and safely challenge their leg muscles. In turn, that potentially leads to a more efficient workout.

When training for volume like Ansley, increased efficiency is an understandable ask. That efficiency might even prevent eventual injury. As one study maintains, one of the most common ways an athlete can injure themselves in their training is a combination of poor technique and overuse of a specific muscle. (2)

 

 

 

 

 

 

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A post shared by Breon Ansley (@breonma_)

[Related: Bodybuilder Shaun Clarida Breaks Down An Intense Arms Workout]

Sissy Squat Machine (Bodyweight)

• Sets and Reps: 1 x 5

Next in line for Ansley is one short, five-rep set on the Sissy Squat Machine — which locks an athlete’s feet and calves into a vertical position while seated to perform the Sissy Squat better. Here, he explains that an emphasis on squeezing in between reps is imperative. 

“If I’m leaning on the pad and squeezing back here, I get that full contraction way at the top here by the hip flexor,” Ansley says. “We want the whole quad to be connected.”

Squeezing during quad workouts can be crucial as research shows it’s one of the more consistent ways to build girth and strength. (3)

Walking Barbell Lunges & Sissy Squats (45-pound plate)

Ansley promised intensity. Naturally, he follows with one superset of walking lunges with a barbell and sissy squats while holding a 45-pound plate. 

“We like to hit everything equally as hard, equally as intense, and get some volume out of all those muscle groups, equally.”

Standing & Seated Calves Machine 

The bodybuilder finishes his extensive leg workout by hitting his calves with another superset on a standing calves machine and a sitting calves machine. 

• Standing Calf Raise: 1 x 5 | 1 x 8
• Seated Calf Raise: 1 x 5

On to the 2022 Tampa Pro

After his 2022 Tampa Pro reveal, Ansley says that he weighs 197 pounds at the moment. By the time that event rolls around, he wants his weight cap to be 180. He will feature in the Classic Physique division at the competition. 

If his new master training plan continues to unfold as expected, Ansley may fare well in Tampa Bay come early August. 

References:

1. Weakley, J.J.S. et al. (2017). The effects of traditional, superset, and tri-set resistance training structures on perceived intensity and physiological responses. European Journal of Applied Physiology. 2017 Jul; 117(9): 1877–1889.
2. Aicale, R., Tarantino, D. Maffuli, N. (2018). Overuse injuries in sport: a comprehensive overview. Journal of Orthopaedic Research and Surgery. 2018 Dec; 13: 309.
3. Lehecka, B.J., Turley, J., Stapleton, A., Waits, K. The effects of gluteal squeezes compared to bilateral bridges on gluteal strength, power, endurance, and girth. PeerJ. 2019; 7: e7287.

Featured image: @breonma_ on Instagram

The post Bodybuilder Breon Ansley Shares a Killer, High-Volume Legs Workout appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

Do you ever wonder why so many lifters that train in commercial gyms wear pants? I’d be willing to bet that it’s because those pants are hiding something embarrassing. What good is it to spend all those hours pumping up your upper body without proportionate legs to match?

Aside from the aesthetic reasons to build a good set of lower limbs, an effective lower body program will also contribute to an overall increase in strength. The bottom line is that there really is no reason to avoid intense leg training. Don’t neglect the entire lower half of your body and be stuck in pants the rest of your life.

The Challenge of Hypertrophy for Legs

Training for strength is quantifiable: you simply have to drive up the numbers. There’s a lot more to it than that, of course; there are techniques, and programs, and a big heaping scoop of intensity that goes along with it. But strength is tangible—you can see on paper the results of your work.

Hypertrophy training, on the other hand, is a different kind of animal. A more aesthetic goal requires more abstract principles, like specific volumes and shorter rest periods to increase muscle fatigue. Combine these principles with leg training, and you have one tough mountain to climb. If you want significant results, leg training is going to be very, very tough. And that is exactly why so many apply only minimal intensity, or skip leg day altogether.

If you find that you are guilty of minimal leg training and intensity, then you will need to adopt a new mindset; one that will enable you to take on the challenge and reap the spoils of your efforts.

Keep a few of these things in mind when shifting your perspective about leg training:

• Perfect your form. Trying to increase the weight on the bar while sacrificing form is a recipe for disaster. Allowing the ego to take over on a set of heavy squats is a one-way ticket to injury, and often results in the lifter swearing off the squat for good. Work on your form and perfect it, no matter how “light” you have to go.
• Think small. With your new emphasis on form, make only small increases in weight. Too big of a leap will affect your technique and leave you with less than favorable results. Small increases with perfect form are far more sustainable.
• Don’t force anything. Performing a movement to impress others has no place in an effective routine. Don’t force anything out of ego, especially when it comes to machines. Natural movements will always be superior to leg presses and hamstring curls.
• Challenge yourself. If you’ve relied mostly on machines for leg training over the years, challenge yourself with the more difficult but natural moves. Try front squats, goblet squats, overhead squats, or any other exercise you might be curious about.
• Go unilateral. One trend that has serious merit is the practice of unilateral exercises. Single limb movements have a powerful impact on your overall performance, as they require less load to be effective, and have a huge benefit in shoring up weak areas.

Laws for Leg Day

As with the upper body, you’ll want to train your entire lower body instead of splitting it up into separate parts. Training quadriceps, hamstrings, and calves all on different days is counterproductive, since all of the muscles in the lower body work together for every exercise. For example, squats stimulate the quadriceps, hamstrings, and glutes without isolating any one muscle.

Stimulating the entire lower body will also stoke your metabolism, burn massive amounts of calories, and generate superior growth. Isolating smaller areas over several days can’t compare to the massive amount of work from training the entire area at once.

Before I give you some ideas of how to structure your lower body training, let’s lay out a few ground rules. This isn’t an exhaustive list, but it will give you a good starting point when constructing your own program.

• Go compound. The leg extension machine is tempting because it’s easy. Stick with mostly compound movements that work the most total muscle at once.
• Isolate light. If you do decide you need a few isolation exercises, go for higher reps and light weight. The leg extension, for example, puts sheer force (stress) on the knee, so tread lightly.
• Go unilateral. Don’t shy away from unilateral exercises. Bulgarian split squats and lunges don’t only challenge your balance and coordination; they will also help shore up any strength imbalances.
• Skip the machines. It may be tempting to use a variety of machines to avoid the effort and complication of free weight movements. Yes, some machines are useful, but a program without the challenge of free weights will do little in the way of overall lower body size development.
• Stay consistent. If you’re the type who program hops, then you aren’t really on the road to progress. Consistency is the hallmark of any program, and your success will live or die by that one principle alone.
• Increase frequency. Training your lower body shouldn’t be a once a week affair. Your legs are resilient, and can learn to recover at a quicker rate than you’re used to. Plan to train the lower body at least twice per week.

Sample Leg Workouts

Below are two examples of lower body plans. Use either one twice per week, or both once per week. Either way, you will want a weekly training frequency of two lower body workouts.

Hard Work Isn’t Complicated

It isn’t complicated to formulate a successful lower body program, but the basic principles laid out above are needed to optimize anyone’s results. A few half-rep squats and attempting to lift the entire weight stack on the leg extension machine isn’t even close to adequate. Challenge yourself, stay consistent, and stick with it. In no time, will you want to toss the pants and break out those shorts for good.

The secret to success isn’t what your bros tell you: Prioritize Results, Not Popular Advice

The post Chicken Legs Don’t Suit You: It’s Leg Day appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

Variable resistance training (VRT), plyometrics, and the Olympic lifts are three popular means of developing power in athletes. All strategies are proven to be effective, but are there periods when one is more appropriate than the others? These are the essential differences:

• VRT places low demand on technical proficiency, but lacks triple extension.
• Plyometrics develop triple extension power under light loads, and are highly specific to most sports.
• The Olympic lifts offer triple extension power development under heavy loads, along with a holistic means of monitoring overall training status of the athlete, but require adequate skill from both the coach and athlete.

I underwent a 600-hour strength and conditioning internship with a Division 1 university as a coach in their Olympic sports department. Coaching in the university athletics setting, I learned that time, or lack thereof, was an important consideration for the training of these athletes.

That being the case, finding “bang for your buck” in exercise selection was absolutely paramount. The Olympic lifts were often coached; however, not nearly enough time could be allocated to their development for the full benefits to come to fruition. Other means to develop power such as VRT and plyometrics were more commonly used, and proven effective.

A recent study¹ showed that adding band resistance of 30% 1RM to the back squat during one training session per week in NCAA Division II collegiate basketball players increased rate of power development more so than the control group, which did not use VRT.

Vertical jump measurements also showed greater improvements than the control, and the researchers cited previous studies showing the same results within their write up.

VRT shines in training environments that have time contstraints or high athlete-to-coach ratios. [Photo credit: Thomas Showers]

Variable resistance training is time efficient because of its ease of execution and implementation.

Take a high-bar back squat for example: a simple movement that involves removing a barbell from a rack, setting the feet at proper width, and maintaining a tight back and midsection throughout a full range of motion squat. Attaching a band to both sides of the barbell and instructing the athlete to squat can take less than a minute.

Adding resistance that increases as the lifter becomes more erect in posture requires more effort during the range of motion that should be the easiest in a squat (the top end).

This forces the lifter to accelerate toward the top of a squat, a trait also present in the Olympic lifts.

The top of the squat inherently places more stress on the quadriceps, which are involved in knee extension. Thus, the acceleratory factor during this stage of movement assists in developing power in the quadriceps (knee extensors). The ankles and hips are not brought to complete extension during the exercise.

The apparatus for this exercise is quick to set up and can be reproduced on multiple squat racks if the training session involves a large group of athletes.

The relatively simplistic technical nature of a high-bar back squat allows the coach to issue quick technique corrections, making them efficient in monitoring multiple athletes at once. This strategy is therefore effective for a coach who must deal with with high volumes of athletes during a session, and who aims to develop powerful knee extension in their athletes.

Olympic Lifts for Triple Extension Intensity

I now coach for a weightlifting and strength and conditioning facility, in which coaching the Olympic lifts are the primary focus. All athletes start practicing these movements on day one, no matter their background, because of how universally effective the lifts can be.

The snatch, clean, and jerk all involve rapid extension of the ankles, knees, and hips at the top of the pull, and dip and drive. The simultaneous extension of these three joints is commonly known as “triple extension.”

Triple extension is also present in a jump or a sprint, arguably the two most common movements in athletics.

The Olympic lifts are essentially a loaded jump while holding a heavy barbell, although rather than propelling one’s body into the air (which can still happen slightly) the lifter propels the barbell into the air and subsequently catches it.

The catch of a snatch, clean, or jerk requires immense stability of the entire body. If any muscle (or group of muscles) is significantly asymmetrically developed, it will show. This is where a sharp coach’s eye becomes important.

Proficiency in the execution of the snatch, clean, and jerk can be judged by the “coach’s eye,” or the coach’s ability to notice errors and inefficiencies in the lifter’s technique.

A keen eye can discover imbalances in a lifter’s musculoskeletal development simply by watching them move on a rep-to-rep basis.

Sharpening one’s eye requires time and experience. It is a skill that is constantly improving or worsening, so it must be used frequently to maintain.

An eye for movement is not exclusive to the Olympic lifts, and should be developed for all movements as a means to monitor an athlete’s progress. The Olympic lifts provide a unique medium to critique an athlete’s movement because of the extreme circumstances they provide.

For the adept coach, a heavily loaded barbell pulled from the floor, launched into the air, and subsequently stabilized overhead or on the shoulders reveals weak links in the chain of movement.

An example of this is a lifter who rotates to one side during the catch of a snatch. This inefficiency indicates that there is a group of muscles contracting in an asymmetrical pattern to the other side, somewhere along the kinetic chains (which run from the toes up to the wrists on both sides of the body).

Let’s say the left hip is externally rotating slightly and the right is internally rotating slightly during a catch in the snatch. Depending on which leg is dominant and how capable the athlete is, this may manifest as an imbalance of force application to the barbell, resulting in a rotation to either side.

Imbalanced hips are often the source of this symptom, but it can also be caused by something as small as gripping the floor more with one foot than the other. Fixing a problem such as this is a topic for another article.

The primary reason the Olympic lifts are irreplaceable in an athlete’s preparation for competition is because of the potential for absolute intensity, or load on the bar, during triple extension.

The most powerful moment in all of sports is the second pull of the clean (the phase of the pull where the knees re-bend and aggressively drive the bar upward to the shoulders).

The second pull mimics the postures present in a maximal effort jump, so heavily loading it will stimulate a unique adaptation. The same can be said of snatches and jerks, during the second pull and amortization of the dip and drive, respectively. No other exercise involving triple extension offers the same potential for absolute intensity.

Loaded Plyometrics and Risk

Plyometrics do not offer the same stimulus to the body as the Olympic lifts because they lack the same absolute intensity. The closest plyometric exercises in intensity may be depth jumps from great height, or the back squat jump.

Back squat jumps provide a loaded means for triple extension, but hip extension is generally incomplete because the implement is placed upon the upper back. Securing the bar to the upper back requires a slight forward tilt of the torso.

Theoretically, an athlete’s back squat jump could be the same absolute intensity as their Olympic lifts, if the back squat 1RM was high enough. Typically, back squat jumps are loaded between 40% and 50% of the 1RM back squat.

Anything more than 50% introduces too much risk of injury. VRT back squat jumps may require even lighter loading. The risk for horizontal movement of the athlete relative to the anchor point of the bands creates potential for non-perpendicular forces to the ground. Chains would be more appropriate for this exercise.

The snatch, clean, and jerk are typically loaded from 60%-100% 1RM, allowing for a variety of speed and force combinations to perform the movements with. The pull of the snatch or clean places the implement in front of the body, and held with the hands.

This bar placement allows for slight backward lean at the end of the second pull, which should be achieved by complete hip extension. Risk of injury is very low with these movements, as long as the coach progresses the athlete appropriately.

Variable resistance training and plyometrics are undoubtedly effective tools to make athletes more powerful. They are typically suited for periods of training where specificity is important.

The two methods are also effective in environments where multiple athletes are training simultaneously. To learn more about VRT, examine literature on the Westside Barbell method, and visit local strength andconditioning or powerlifting gyms. For plyometrics, read the works of Yuri Verkhoshansky, and talk to strength and conditioning or track and field coaches.

Ultimately, the Olympic lifts require a fair amount of skill to execute and coach, and provide a unique means for loading triple extension with high absolute intensity. They also offer the opportunity to monitor an athlete’s movement efficiency.

Developing a keen eye for these efficiencies or inefficiencies takes experience. If you want to gain experience in coaching these lifts, find a weightlifting club near you on the USA Weightlifting website; preferably one with a highly experienced coach that’s developed national level lifters.

Be humble and let them teach you a thing or two. Take the USAW coaching courses, read the literature, and immerse yourself in a training environment. Strength coaching is a trade. Trades involve apprentices and masters, and no one gets to skip their apprenticeship.

Weightlifters: What should your training focus be?

How to Analyze Which of Your Lifts Needs Attention

Guide your athletes:

Move Well First: A New Path for Coaching Fitness

Reference:

1. Joy, Jordan M., Ryan P. Lowery, E. Oliveira de Souza, and Jacob M. Wilson. “Elastic bands as a component of periodized resistance training.” Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research (2013).

The post Lower Body Power: VRT vs Plyometrics vs Olympic Lifts appeared first on Breaking Muscle.