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Honestly for me I use the leg extensions as my primary quad work out as the best mobility I got right now is a half squat without endangering my back or shifting my weight on my toes. So being able to use the leg extension really helps keep my quads using full ROM while I improve flexibility
i actually didn't start watching this guy until recently, i always scrolled past him because the first video i saw of his started with a very hot take that i hated so much i just left before i figured out it was a joke. lol
@@yashirosan8328and since he gives advice to Ditch the press. He really doesn't need to. He only needs to know influencers who guide him better like sean is here
a compound movement is limited by your weakest link in the chain a leg press isolates your strong chains and takes out the weak links meaning you can develop big weaknesses if you ignore the compounds but also if you have a broken link and squats are impossible but still want to train your legs you do leg presses pointless to argue about this. every exercise has a purpose. do what is best for your goals and limitations
Platz has a point but I’d say for 99% of gymgoers, you don’t have the same goals as him. Most important part of leg day is performing effective movements safely to failure.
Close to failure* doesn’t always have to be to failure. Studies have shown this. You’re only building more fatigue by always going to failure. Don’t get me wrong I go to failure because my workout feels more “complete” but definitely not a necessity for hypertrophy and muscle growth
what point? calling great exercise useless is just wild there're some great bodybuilders who rarely squat and use leg press/hack/etc. to work around this I have spinal cord issues and can't squat with heavy weight and I built powerful legs without squats (using leg press and hack squat as substantiate for it). regular squat puts a lot of pressure on your lower back, it's bound to your anatomy (for some people it works more on glutes, for other - more on quads) it creates much more system fatigue as you actually need to hold all this weight on your back/shoulders this is hard to do a squat to failure, not to mention dropsets it's easy to do a leg press to failure, even easier to do a dropset it's quite easy to spot and assist on leg press it's quite hard to spot and assist on squat so, it's a completely different exercise
Squats are the best quad builder. I mean, unless your femurs are disproportionately long. Then they're lackluster as far as muscle growth. Or if your lower back is snapped up. Or if you like to train to absolute failure, and have no spotter. Or if your gym is extremely busy and all of the squat racks are taken. Or if your knees are shot out. Well dang, i guess there are several good reasons to use leg press instead of the squat.
Femurs too long? No, unless you're like 7+ foot tall, this is no excuse. Plenty of tall weightlifters out there who do tonnes of squatting Train to failure with no spotter: no, just no. Find a rack with safety bars. If your gym doesn't have one, find a better gym Gym busy: yep, I hate this, so I organise my life in such a way that I can go when it's quiet and there's always a rack available. (P.s. I work full time, usually from the office, and have a baby at home, and squat multiple times per week) The only thing that holds up are if you have knee or back injuries. I will assume you have at least a 3 digit IQ and realise Tom Platz was not suggesting you should squat if you have a fucked up back.
@@MrRowntree27 i didn't say just long femurs. I said disproportionately long femurs, as i have. I, as well as plenty of other people, have leg lenths of someone well over 6ft tall, but are well below 6ft tall. So I've never had good leverages for squatting, and after a few years of doing them every week on leg day in my early 20's, all i got were bad knees. Someone who is proportioned normally will have better leverages, no matter how tall they are. And yes, you can train to technical failure, like mentzer, without a spotter on almost every exercise, but not like dorian yates failure. By the way, the gym i go to does have safety bars on all the squat racks. And yes, a busy gym does suck, and you make a good point about how busy you are. But i have you beat on that. I have 2 full time jobs. 1 where I'm on shift for 24 hours at a time, and one where i work for upwards of 12 hours a day in the 2 days in between shifts. I work a minimum of 6 days a week, every week. I also have 2 young sons to take care of as well. So i don't have the luxury of just going to a gym in the middle of the night when nobody else is there. I have to go when i can, no matter what time of day it is. And I'm not the only person that has this same type of schedule. As far as your smart ass comment about tom platz not suggesting that you should squat if you have a fucked up back, i didn't say he did. My entire comment was about reasons to not squat, and how there are several other options that are just as good, probably better for a lot of people. But way to be a dick right out of the gate.
My femurs are disproportionately long compared to my torso almost twice the size as my wife’s and we are the same height. Want to know how to squat with long femurs? Lean forward as you drop to keep the weight directly over the center of your foot. Kick your knees forward and thrust your hips as you push back up. Wide stance for outer quads and hammys, narrow stance for inner and lower quads
@@clappedshinobi2863 I know what you mean. But it shifts the tension to your lower back and off the quads. Believe me, i tried several different variations over the years, just not for me. Hurts my knees too much anymore. At this point i just use the hack squat machine and the leg press. Maybe some split squats when my knees are feeling good. I never knock the squat as being a bad exercise, because i don't really believe that any exercise is inherently bad. But not everyone is built to do everything. And please understand, my original comment wasn't to take away from the squat. It was to point out that toms statement left out other factors, and that other exercises aren't necessarily inferior to the squat. Hell, there are videos of him doing other leg exercises, so there must be something to them.
Nothing is like squats... if you have the most advantageous build ever. For others, it's not viable to train them that hard, it'll kill their backs before their legs. Squat for strength and skill, then make up the big volume on the leg press.
I personally think Leg Presses and Leg Extensions really help people to still train their lower body if they have back injuries. I have lower back issues so I mostly progressive overload with Leg Presses and Extensions. For Squats, I take my time to increase the weight.
@@danielkrome6640 So far I dont have any issue with my lower back on Leg Presses. And I agree that I dont have any issues with Hack Squats to my lower back, but I dont have those on my current gym. Would love to try the Pendulum Squats but I think those machine are pretty rare on my country.
@@danielkrome6640 you'll only have lower back issues with leg press if you let your butt lift off the seat. Keep it planted, no lower back pain. This is coming from a guy that leg presses over 800lbs for reps.
For someone with extremely long femurs I spent years trying to improve my squat, only to end in injury and pain time and time and time again. Squats aren’t for everyone, you just gotta find exercises that work for YOU.
Dude thats the most basic movement to lift your torso from the ground and be able to walk. You are not doing squats and deadlifts you are not training at all
@@enricofriske1696 How ignorant are you? I can almost guarantee that I have a better physique than you and do neither squats or deadlifts lol you are quite close minded. Good luck with the injuries you will inevitably have to nurse doing your heavy squats and deadlifts, I plan to be healthy and lean with a six pack well into my late 30s 😁
@@enricofriske1696 depends on your definition of training hard. Ronnie Coleman was destroyed because of squats, Jay Cutler is 50 and still looks good because of Leg Presses and Hack Squats. You do you, squats are not for everyone, especially for the taller individuals.
People will say to listen to Platz because of his results/accomplishments, while simultaneously ignoring people who got results using leg press (and the scientific literature backing it up). It’s not one or the other. We don’t always have to turn everything into an “us VS. them” to feel superior. Pretty sad to see someone who has such a platform and accomplished so much use his voice to spread misinformation.
@@bwarring21squats don't work your hamstrings either. Leg presses aren't supposed to work your core in the same way as a squat. That's the beauty of machines. It takes away the need to stabilize so all of the output can come from the muscle you're trying target, in this case the glutes and quads
@@bwarring21 its literally in the clip when he says modifying your feet position on the leg press will dictate what muscle group you can target or put more emphasis on. You shouldn't have to read or "look up" anything to prove this to anyone - Prove it to yourself by going to the gym, get on a leg press, and execute it with different foot positions and you'll see for yourself. JFC all this over analyzing and micro analyzing stuff, seeking confirmation bias from the "experts" is what's keeping you small and weak, fam. Dunning Kruger effect, anyone???
Why do an inferior movement? I do leg press only because it’s objectively better for quads and glutes/adductors. The only case where freeweight squat would be better is in a case where you are pre-fatiguing ur quads or something to make them the limiting factor. There is no limiting factor on a leg press so that wouldn’t be possible.
Emphasis on that lower back protection. I loved to squat but I can’t put as much work in as I want cause of lower back problems. I love the leg press and extension
Platz definitely has a point on this one. The general population is so clueless about training, learning to do squats for the first one to two years is necessary. People say they can leg press 400 pounds then get under the barbell and can't squat 225 to parallel. Unless you're intermediate or advanced, prioritize squats and develop stabilization and range of motion before doing leg presses
Exactly. The leg press more often than not from what I've seen is just an ego lifting tool. It gives people a very warped perception of how strong they actually are.
I agree, I used to only do leg press. When I realized how weak my legs were when I got under a barbell, squats became the most important part of my lower body exercises. Since then I have seen strengths increases and my quads have grown.
@MonkeyyFN I would classify constantly putting yourself at risk of breaking your back or killing yourself above being "hard". This might be news to you, but people have more going for their life then going to the gym
In my experience, squats are better than leg press. However the leg press is better for minimizing injury Edit: I do now prefer leg press just because it’s easier on my lower back
@@zack9912000 This is just fundamentally untrue, for any lift. You can get injured with perfect form, and reasonable weight. When you train, particularly at higher weights (even ones you can normally manage) you are literally breaking down bodily tissue. Sometimes things just haven't recovered properly, and something you've done perfectly 1000x before suddenly causes something to snap, crackle or pop. If you go into the gym every day thinking you're never going to get hurt just because you're doing everything right, you're gonna get a shock one day. There are things you can do to reduce injury risk, and correct form with reasonable weights are examples of that, but literally nothing will ever make you injury _immune_ when it comes to lifting weights.
Me @ 2x knee surgery and 1x lower back surgery (all service, not gym related): I will probably never squat heavy again. Leg press, lunge, sumo deadlift. That is all I am willing to risk. If you don't understand, I don't care.
Thanks Sean, I always have problems with others giving me flak over using a leg press. I like it, it's nice on my lower back, I can do calve raises with it and other foot placements.
Exercise alternatives also exist because some people just can't do certain exercises due to injury or mobility problems. For instance I could squat fine based on my lower body, but ever since shoulder surgery (judo injury) about 6 years ago I havent been able to put my right arm behind my head or mobilise my right trap upwards because the surgery needed to tie all of those things together to keep my shoulder in the socket. I literally can't reach far enough behind me to hold the back on my back, and for some reason hacksquat machines don't exist in my country...
I trained at Planet Fitness for a year during covid. I used the leg press instead of Smith machine squats (because I hadn't seen the truth yet), and I took my squat up by about 25lb. The leg press absolutely is a good movement!
Leg press funked up my patella tendon. Ironically my physiotherapist friend got me to do squats to reverse the injury over a year. Any time I try to go back to the leg press now after 2.5 years, I get the pain coming back 1 week later. I do heavy squats at the moment too, and all is good.
I've seen his squat. Yeah, if I could have that bananas vertical torso angle with crazy knee travel I would also think squats were the greatest thing for quads ever, too.
@@lulyhead yep, nothing any the relative lengths of your torso to femur length impacts squat form in the slightest. The shape of my hip socket has no impact on my squat either. It's all just grit, determination, and soft tissue work. That'll definitely make my bones shaped differently.
In other words, do whatever works for you. Tom Platz, Ronnie Coleman, Jay Cutler, Lee Priest, Mike Mentzer, Dorian Yates, etc, all had great legs but different training styles and several of these BBs did utilize the Leg Press.
Not everybody has Platz’ leverages. Some movements hit people just right, others not so much. Bodybuilding isn’t about how much you lift or what exercises you do, it’s about finding what works to make you as jacked as possible.
Leg press helped me get rid of my knee pain. Helped me build up the knees and the simple act of getting up from a sitting position no longer hurts me. And I went from three plates on each side to literally seven plates on each side in a few months. Also, it’s helped me with my overall core strength and balance.
Tom Platz's body was made for squats, short height with an ideal femur to shin ratio. He was a great body builder but he should stay away from coaching. Most of his advice are pure, high grade bullsh*t.
He lost any credibility when he said that squats were safer than deadlifts. Like... How ? The squats literally put a coaxial pressure on your spine by having the weight press on your shoulders. How is that safer than doing deadlifts or belt squats ?
he said it because it is true. The number of injuries due to deadlifts VS number due to squats is almost the same both in the 30 % range depending on the data variables However the type and duration of injury from deadlifts is much more significant! Deadlift injuries tend to be debilitating long term
As I think most people know, the seated leg press can be very bad for the back if you make any mistakes. I don’t care how huge and muscular you are, the lower back is just not meant to take that kind of force and torque.
His point was more so to the fact that many people do leg press INSTEAD of the squat, which is probably not optimal since the squat trains a lot more muscles than the leg press does
Some people aren't built to squat. If they've proportionately longer legs, then the stress on the knees is too high. Tom Purvis has done some fantastic videos on this.
As someone born with a permanent low back injury thats more or less akin to a permanently herniated disk in my lumbar spine, i f*cking love the leg-press machine more than any other equipment in the entire gym. 😅 8 times out of 10 my back wont allow me to squat heavy, without that machine i would be skipping legday almost every time. 😂
Tom is right... nothing even come close to squat in terms of mass and strength gains...He's also right about that proper squat form takes years to learn...
@@spacepirate9882 he just said... it's hard... he can't recover easily from his squat routine... this doesn't mean it's ineffective... squat is the number 1 leg developer... that's why all around the world every athlete does squat... watch his videos...
depends on your goal squats- psychologically,mentally ,hard work, cardiovascular system, works every muscle in the body,separating the men from the boys, to go somewhere so deep in yourself to push yourself beyond your limits, help build a body like a Greek statue, helps with posture and the list keeps going leg press- internet bodybuilders pharmacy chemist enhanced steroid users or social influences, to film overloading the leg press to do quarter reps
I used to squat for a long time, struggled with the movement from day 1, had lower back pain almost every time.. I obviously tried to correct my form as well as I could. About 2 years in lying in bed with a sore lower back I asked my self wtf am I doing, why was a insisting on getting hurt so much just to satisfy my ego. Switched to leg press going real deep with moderate weight and real slow eccentrics, pain free and made more gains than ever. Never squatting again, leg day is actually fun now.
Just because someone had great legs doesnt mean that he's always correct. you can achieve great results even when not training "optimally". It's just simply incorrect to call the leg press a worse squat. Is the squat "bad", no not at all. Is the leg press "bad", also no
@Fafnir8080 He didn't just have great legs , he had the goat legs 🦵 , so yes we should listen to what he has to say about growing legs. and he didn't say that leg presses were a "worse squat" .
@@deadmoney5580 Genetics are a huge factor in body building and strength training. Just because you're the best doesn't mean you know how anyone else should train. In fact when you're a genetic anomaly, it almost guarantees whatever you're doing is not going to be the best plan for everyone else.
@@nichtsistkostenlos6565thats craaazy saying Platz has good genetics, the whole reason people follow him is that he is one of the only bodybuilders who did it with worse genetics than all his competitors
Personally I feel like I can go to failure with squats easier with the safe bars on the correct height. Leg press doesn’t burn or feel like it stimulates me personally enough, and it’s kinda weird going to failure
Try slow asf eccentrics and getting so deep your knees are nearly to your armpits. I never felt leg presses were challenging but once I started doing them like this it was almost as torturous as squats. I had to drop loads of weight aswell
@@Screwtoast2I literally done this knowing after video recording myself I was doing chicken reps and was not bringing my knees all the way down. As soon as I brought them down, I am literally screaming on those last 2 reps close to failure. Absolutely brutal.
Leg presses will never produce the same amount of gains as squats. I’ve tried both exercises for many years. Unless you have some knee or joint problems, stick with squats
Gym machines are created to help people with injuries achieve gains similar to ones you get from compound movements. Leg press is not inferior, it is an adaptation.
People will just say, but he did steroids. Yes, it doesn't mean he doesn't know what he's talking about. Squats are better than leg press. Simple as that. Although I get the thing about having back issues, and if so leg press does make a good substitute. Other than that squats are just better. I've lifted weights with my younger cousin before in my basement home gym. Full power rack, multiple sets of 45s cable machines and all that. He said we should go to the gym sometime where they have a leg press so we could do a real leg workout 😆. I said dude this is the leg workout, Squats 😆. I think most people just like the leg press because their squat is bad, and they can load up a bunch of 45s, and Say they're strong.
And the influencer is right, also there are several other body builders on Tom Platz's level that do leg presses, Chris Bumstead, Markus Rühl, Ronnie Coleman all used/use the leg press to build their physiques
That’s gear and genetics, bud. He worked hard, but all bodybuilders train hard at his level. His legs were genetic, so don’t try lol. Also why his advice doesn’t apply to regular folks
Dorian Yates (6 time Mr. Olympia) was wrong too if we go by that logic... Mostly leg presses during his golden days of bodybuilding and had insane legs too.
Love it! Personally, I start a quads and calf session with front squats (volume), then back squats (power), and then leg press (volume first then power).
Love the breakdowns. Challenges every industry fitness gurus hypotheticals with the purity of fact, coupled with his experience. Follow this man. He knows how to train.
I'm 6'4" with very long legs, so squats don't really work with my structure. I've built really large legs over 35 years of on/off lifting with only leg press and leg extensions for quads.
I cant do squats. Long legs kills my lower back. I do leg presses and leg extensions. But I do my leg presses with max range of motion, flare my knees out to pass my my stomach. Get great quad stimulus.
Simple : you'll have greater gains with isolation movements because of the fact you can take them to failure better than squats, but squats are good movements to target all muscle groups
1: do a compound movement 2: isolate the muscles to achieve failure more reliably ( if u want idk i like it) 3: eat good food, consume enough protein and enough calories 4: gains
It's hard cause it's a compound movement that forces you to use multiple muscle groups to synchronize simultaneously lifting heavy weights; hence, more fatigue. Leg press is more optimal for growth. Squats will be great for overall strength followed by size. However, squat is a natural movement that should be mastered because it's used frequently.
Shifting foot positions does not nearly benefit you as much as squats. It’s inferior for the quads, but the leg press is decent for a good eccentric of the flutes and hamstrings
I gotta be honest. I like leg presses and extensions because squats can definitely hurt my back and make me less likely to train legs again. I started integrating front squats with dumbbells and it’s helped me a lot. I have a “genetic” back issue so why wouldn’t I do what’s more comfortable for me? I’m not a competitive bodybuilder.
If we're being technical, compound movements like squats are less efficient because (1) it's most efficient to exercise an isolated muscle instead of a group of muscles because of fatigue, (2) squats put the contact pressure at the traps and upper spine versus your feet and entire back, and (3) it's much easier to control a leg press versus a squat, leading to a lower risk of injury.
Tbh I’ve seen many guys with skinny legs putting up crazy weights on the leg press, but do nothing on squats. I can’t say I’ve seen any skinny leg guys squatting heavy.
