Leg Press Mechanics and Setup

I see this all the time on Instagram and it grinds my gears. Put your foot like this on the leg press to get the glute medius, like this to get the glute minimus, like this to get the glute maximus. It's like, how about you just put your feet on the plate the normal way and do it the way that you can lift the most fucking weight and you're going to get all the fucking glutes because you're in the most weight possible and not like a leg press a leg press is a terrible machine to focus on your glutes just stop you have so many other exercises that can hit the glutes better than the leg press it's and it's like a look it's like a okay it's like this bench press guys do bench press to get a bigger chest there's nothing inherently wrong with that but the bench press is not a chest movement. It's a horizontal pressing movement. So you do the bench press to get better at the bench press. It has a side effect that makes your shoulders and your chest and your triceps bigger. But if you wanted to focus primarily on the chest, use things that are primarily chest oriented, like cable flies, deck, things that are actually going to be biased towards the chest. By the same token, if you wanted to build bigger quads and you could use, yeah, you could use the leg press, Right. But what's going to make the quads grow even better? Use the leg press to get better at the leg press and use a leg extension to isolate the quad and hit the rec fem. Since you don't really hit that that much on the leg press. Anyways, if you're going to use the leg press and you want to in a glute program, stop trying to fit your ass into a leg press. Just get the stronger leg press and go do reverse hypers or do back extensions or do whatever. do things that are going to put your glutes in a position where they're going to grow and then use isolation work like kickbacks and cables abduction and things like that i hate that i freaking hate cable shit for the glutes but that that's exactly the point like people whenever clients finally film their leg presses for me they have their feet high up the plate the way that they're taught from instagram and then as soon as i get them to do it the way that i do it which is lower on the plate, narrower feet, they're moving so much more weight. And all of a sudden they feel their glutes. Yeah. Because you finally got your glutes under a really big fricking stretch, which you don't do when they're at 90 degrees or less because you have them up the plate. So just do it so you can push the most weight possible. Then go do like a glute RDL. It's like they say you're, you're only as strong as your weakest link. So if your glutes are the weakest link and you're doing leg pressure, glutes are going to grow and they'll go, well, my quads overpower it. I'm like, okay, if you get into a good stretch position with the glutes where your quads can't really do anything because your quads aren't going to extend the hip, go deep to the point where you get your glutes in there and you're going to find out you're going to have to take a lot of weight off because you haven't been doing full range leg press because the reason your quads have gotten so big is because you're basically only doing the range of motion where the quads have the best leverage and you're not going deep enough to get the glutes in. But then that also necessitates they understand how to set the leg press, not just the feet, but set the back pad to be able to go far. Because here's another prime example of my gym. We have two leg presses. One of the leg presses has an adjustable back plate. Every dude that comes in there will put the back plate all the way up. If you put the back plate all the way up, you don't have any range of motion because you're already hinged. Let me see if I can do this. Let's say This is my leg press and I've got the back all the way up. I don't, there's no room for me to move my femur. The only thing I do, I could go out here and try to go back there. Now, if I laid the bench back, now I have all this room. So people need to pay a lot of attention to how they're actually setting up the machine before they get on the machine. If you have the ability to adjust the back up and down put it all the way down as far down as it go because that open up your hip and allow you to move into a really good amount of hip flexion which means great Now I can get my glutes in the mix but if I sitting upright my glutes aren't in a position to actually do anything. It's all quad. And I also don't have a lot of room to move the joint. The bones have to move around each other. So if I start to come back and I get a pinch in the front of my hip, or I just can't move it that far, there's no space for you to go you need you're gonna have to set yourself back up on that squat or that leg press or you may have to rearrange the mechanics of the leg press so that it's actually set up to work the muscles you're looking for yeah