Leg Day with Mike O'Hearn

Leg Workout Exercise #1

TIMED SQUATS / UNDER TENSION SQUATS

Get a wooden box or a plyo box and place it underneath where you will be squatting. Ensure that the box height allows you to reach at least a 90 degree bend in your knees when performing your squats. We don’t want to go much further than that for this specific exercise as the goal is to keep tension on the muscles the entire time.

This exercise will require a timer. We used our iPhone to time a one-minute set. The squat is broken up into three movements. These are the downward (eccentric) movement, a pause at the lowest part of the range of motion, and the upward (concentric) movement. The tempo is slightly different for each part of the exercise:

Downward movement: 8 seconds

Pause at the bottom: 2 seconds

Upward movement: 6-8 seconds

The is no explosion from the bottom pause to the upwards movement. This specific exercise focuses on you contracting your muscle fibers in your legs with no fast, or explosive movements. Each timed set will be one minute long or until you hit failure. For reference on the warm up sets, the team did a set with a plate on each side, then two plates, and then three plates.

Set	Timed	Reps	Rest
1 – warm up	No	10-15 (standard tempo)	2 minutes
2	No	3-5 (slow tempo)	2 minutes
3	Yes	Failure	2 minutes
4	Yes	Failure	2 minutes
5	Yes	Failure	2 minutes

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Leg workout exercise #2: Leg press with time under tension and full range of motion

This is an advanced movement that requires care and caution. In this exercise, Mike and the team lowered the leg press sled slowly until it completely bottoms out. A similar tempo will be used here as in the first exercise, except it will be two seconds down, a one second pause, and two seconds up. When the sled bottoms out, you can release the tension on your legs momentarily, and then contract the muscles with no explosion to slowly raise the weight off of it’s resting place.

Additionally, it’s important to keep your knees from pointing inwards. Instead, push your knees slightly outward so that you can lower the sled all the way down until it bottoms out. Again, this is an advanced movement. If you haven’t done this range of motion before, use lighter weight, as it will stretch your muscle fibers and tendons beyond what they are used to. Caution is required with this exercise and if you have any knee issues or injuries that are pre-existing, be sure to check with your doctor first.

Set	Drop set	Reps	Rest
1	No	10-12	2 minutes
2	No	10-12	2 minutes
3	No	10-12	2 minutes
4	No	10-12	2 minutes

Leg workout exercise #3: Hack squat with feet back

In this leg workout exercise, we put our feet back as far as we could go and also pointed our toes slightly outward. When performing this movement, we ensured that our knees also pushed outward and didn’t point inward. This movement is counter intuitive to what most people are taught for leg workouts. However, it creates a stretch, stress, and tension on the quads, hamstrings, and glutes that you don’t usually get. This will help build more strength, power, and mass overall. Use a similar tempo to the leg press.

Set	Drop set	Reps	Rest
1	No	10-12	2 minutes
2	No	10-12	2 minutes
3	No	10-12	2 minutes
4	No	10-12	2 minutes

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