Tag: tom platz
These Tom Platz Videos Will Pump You Up for Your Next Leg Workout
Tom Platz – The King of Quads
Tom Platz arguably had the most insane legs of all time (and still does based off recent video footage!). If this name doesn’t ring a bell for you, you have been missing out on something great all your life. Platz is a golden-era bodybuilder and stepped on the Mr. Olympia stage along with Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Tom’s legs got the way they were because of his insane workouts. We’re sure you might have seen hundreds, if not more, workout videos, but you’ll never have seen anything like the Tom Platz leg workouts.
If you’re one of those people who despise leg days and can’t find the motivation to train your wheels, watching a Tom Platz training video before hitting your legs can be the motivation you so badly need.
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Tom Platz loved squatting and swore by the exercise. He considered squats to be the best leg exercise and relied heavily on them in his leg workouts. After squats, he preferred hack squats and sissy hack squats.
Many of us mortals might get light headed just thinking about the volume of squats he performed. All of us can learn a lot about squatting and having a better form by following Platz’s principles.
How Many Can You Do?
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We’re sure you might be doing leg extensions and leg curls in your workouts, but have you ever done these exercises the way Platz does them? Chances are, Tom Platz is the only person who does them the way he does and that’s why he has the legs he has.
In your next leg workout, get yourself a spotter, but instead of asking him for support, tell him to add resistance to your reps. Adding external resistance to the weights will fill your muscles with blood and lactic acid, giving you a gorging pump.
Taking it to the Extreme
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Tom Platz has a very different view about training than many of his peers. Listen to him talk and you’ll realize he’s all about hitting failure with every set. There is nothing called overtraining in his dictionary.
At the same time, in his bodybuilding days, Platz’s leg workouts were so intense that he only trained his legs twice a month. Tom’s range of motion while performing his exercises is something we all can learn.
Platz – The Trainer
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You can take a bodybuilder of out bodybuilding, but you can’t take the bodybuilding out of a bodybuilder. Tom Platz now spends his time training people and we can all access his infinite bodybuilding wisdom through these videos.
Before a workout, you never know how many reps Platz is going to do or how many reps he’s going to make his trainees do. He’s all about going until the body can’t take any more. Platz didn’t believe in making his workouts look beautiful. Tom believed if he made his exercises look nasty, his wheels would turn out nasty as well. He was right!
Some Squatting Tips to Take Away
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Always keep your back straight while squatting. Don’t bend forward as it puts more tension on your lower back and glutes and recruits less of your quads. Squeeze and keeps your quads tight throughout the exercise.
While squatting, make your nose your pivot point. Your nose should go straight down perpendicular to the ground as you squat. It should be like jumping straight into a swimming pool. If your nose looks like you’re diving into the pool, you’re doing it wrong.
To wrap things up, look at this video of Tom Platz doing 23 reps with 525lbs on the bar. Platz has a smile on his face all throughout the set. This shows how much he loves what he does. Before we part, always remember, you’ve got five more left in you.
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Who has the best legs in the bodybuilding industry in your opinion? Let us know in the comments below. Also, be sure to follow Generation Iron on Facebook and Twitter.
*Header image courtesy of Tom Platz YouTube.
The 4 Effective Leg Building Exercises Which No One Does
Build Monster Legs With These Exercises
A pair of shredded legs is what separates the men from the boys. Most people stick to the same exercises while training their legs and leave gains on the table. All leg exercises aren’t created equal. Some exercises target your wheels better than the others.
A normal leg training session consists of squats, leg presses, extensions, and curls. While there is nothing wrong with these exercises, there are some exercises which can help you in changing your routine and build size and definition in your legs.
Performing the same exercises over and over again can make you hit a plateau. Adding new exercises to your workouts will shock your muscles and will help you in breaking the plateau. Every exercise targets your muscles in a different way which is great for ensuring an overall muscle development.
Platz Hack Squats
The legendary Tom Platz had one of the nastiest legs in the bodybuilding history. He came up with this variation of the hack squats. The Platz hack squats target your outer quad sweep and the teardrop in your quads.
Stand with your heels joined together and your toes pointing outwards. Perform a squat while pushing your knees down and forward. Your heels will come off the base as you squat. As you start pressing up, push onto the outer part of your feet. Doing this will transfer the tension onto the outer quad sweep.
Sissy Squats
Sissy squats have been around since the 1960s, but chances are you’re hearing about them for the first time. Don’t let the name of the exercise fool you. The sissy squats are a great finisher and will fill your quads with lactic acid.
If you’re performing this exercise for the first time, hold onto a squat rack around the hip level or slightly higher. Take a shoulder-width stance and slowly start to lower yourself by bending your knees and pushing them down and forward.
Your back will fall backward while you’re on the descent. Your heels will come off the ground as your knees go down. At the bottom of the movement, your quads should be at least parallel to the floor. Return to the starting position and repeat for reps.
Good Mornings
Good mornings are a compound (multi-joint) exercise which works your hamstrings. Most people make the mistake of going too heavy on this exercise. Good mornings are an exercise which requires a mind-muscle connection.
Stand with a barbell placed across the rear of your shoulders. Keep a slight bend in your knees and an arch in your back throughout the exercise. Push your hips back as you bend your back until it is almost parallel to the floor. Think of your hamstrings as chains used to lower and lift your back.
Step-Ups
Step-ups are a unilateral functional exercise which helps you in training one leg at a time. If you have a weaker leg, unilateral exercises can help you fix this problem as the stronger leg can’t compensate for the weaker one.
Step-ups have many variations and can be adjusted according to your fitness level. Hold a dumbbell in each hand and use your right leg to step onto a knee-to-hip high platform. Bring your left leg up and stand on the platform, then step back with left leg to return to the floor. Both your feet should be on the floor after you step back. Repeat the movement with your left leg and alternate between your legs for the desired reps.
Which day of the week do you train your legs? Let us know in the comments below. Also, be sure to follow Generation Iron on Facebook and Twitter.
Let’s Revive This Forgotten Way of Building Monster Legs
Let’s Revive This Forgotten Way of Building Monster Legs
Remember when legs were everyone’s favorite muscle to train? We neither. Training legs, if done right, can be taxing. One big reason for exhaustion while hitting your wheels is that your legs are half of your body, and most of your blood and oxygen are pumped into them while training, leaving your brain and lungs running on fumes.
With the introduction of fancy training equipment like the seated hamstring curls, abductor, and adductor machines we have seen a big change in the leg workout routines. Make no mistake, we are not implying that people these days don’t have great legs.
Heck, pro bodybuilders on stage these days are arguably the freakiest since the advent of bodybuilding and we don’t mean this negatively. Most people attend bodybuilding shows to watch the freaks of nature in action and the guys on stage deliver on those expectations.
This article is not a comparison between the golden day and today’s bodybuilders. It’s aimed at pointing out the change in the leg training style over the years and to see if going back to the old ways can improve leg development.
Building Monster Legs The Old School Way
Our old-school quadzilla idol is none other than Tom Platz. If you’ve ever seen videos of Platz training legs, you’d realize it’s nothing like what we see in today’s YouTube leg training motivational videos.
Tom Platz’s leg workouts were so brutal that people attended his leg training sessions to learn his techniques and most people looked in awe when he got under the bar or sat on the leg-extension machine.
If you’ve ever watched the critically-acclaimed movie, Pumping Iron, how many bodybuilders did you spot using the abductor or hip-thrust machines? Could you complain about the wheels of any of the bodybuilders shown in the documentary?
Going Old School – Higher Reps
Coming back to Tom Platz. One of Tom’s biggest pieces of advice is, “the quads need higher reps than other muscle groups, like 15-20 or more to grow.” When was the last time you performed 15-20 reps of something while training legs?
These day’s we see a complicated system where people use a percentage of 1RM to determine how much weight they’d be lifting in a set. Don’t get us started on how to calculate a one-rep-max.
Most people deliberately underperform on a 1RM to set the bar low so that they can post fancy numbers on social media. Calculating 1RM can be complicated, and if you don’t want to open an excel sheet or a graph chart, you’d be better off doing what Platz did, perform higher reps.
Benefits of Higher Reps
Some people think that higher reps translate to lighter weights. This isn’t exactly true. Many lifters on a gaining program think that lifting light for higher reps is for people on a ‘cutting’ schedule.
On the contrary, lifters on a shredding routine think that lifting heavy for a lesser number of reps will make them bulky. Both these approaches are as far away from the truth as they can be.
Time under tensions (TuT) is one of the most important factors in adding muscle mass as it leads to the breaking of muscle fibers while training. With proper rest and diet, these broken muscle cells grow out to be bigger and stronger. The shorter your sets are, the lesser will be the tension on your muscle fibers.
Lifting Heavy is IN!
In today’s internet age, squatting 405lbs for 2 reps is way sexier than lifting 225lbs for 20 reps. Don’t believe us? Open your Instagram and look for an internet fitness celebrity who lifts moderate weights for higher reps.
Most of the content creators these days are chasing strength while undermining the importance of endurance. It maybe has something to do with the “go heavy or go home” mindset, which has its place but kills the benefits of time under tension.
Lifting super-heavy is undoubtedly hard but bearing the pain of high-rep quad exercises is not for the weak-hearted. 20 repetitions of squats will introduce you to soul-grinding, hypertrophy-inducing pain.
The Golden Age Leg Building Technique
Enough with the chatter, let’s get down to the business of building monster legs. Although we have spoken a lot about squats in this article, leg press, hack squat, leg extensions, and leg curls machines are great leg-building tools.
Quad Focussing Leg Press Workout:
1. Place your feet close to the bottom of the sled. Use a close-feet stance and push mainly through your toes rather than your heels to focus on your quads and limit the involvement of the hamstrings.
2. Close your eyes, shut your mind and go for 25 reps. Make sure you follow a full range of motion. Partial reps are going to do you no good. If you fail at around 15-20 reps, lighten the load and complete 30 reps. Getting the weights right for 25 reps is going to take 2-3 trial runs.
3. Perform three sets of these “sissy” sets. But it doesn’t end here. Put on some plates on the sled and do one final set of 8-10 reps. We’re here to get the best of both worlds, remember?
You can follow this same technique for all your leg exercises like squats, leg curls, extensions, and hack squats.
Leave Your Brains at Home Technique
There is another Tom Platz technique for building monster legs that are hidden away since the Instagram fitness models took over – the ten-minute sets. Tom Platz once put 225lbs on the bar and performed squats for 10 minutes straight – without stopping.
Before you lose your shit, we’ll be the first to admit that this technique needs some tweaking. How about we turn the ten-minute sets into two-minute sets? We knew you’d like that.
P.S – you don’t have to stick with the lighter weights for higher reps philosophy. You are free to test your mettle by squatting heavier weights for higher reps.
P.S.S – by higher reps, we mean up to 50 reps.
P.S.S.S – maybe it’s time to change the conversation from “how much can you squat?” to “for how long can you squat?”
For how long can you squat, bro? Let us know in the comments below. Also, be sure to follow Generation Iron on Facebook and Twitter.
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