reckonerLeg press
A machine that lets you push a heavy sled with your legs while your back is supported. Balance, bracing and bar position are all taken out, which is what makes it useful when you want to work the legs hard and what makes it a poor substitute for a squat.
Stop before the hips round off the pad.
- Pattern
- Squat
- Trains
- Quads, glutes
- Kit
- Machine leg press
- Loading
- A weight you choose
- Reckoner prescribes
- 4 sets of 5 to 8 reps at RPE 8
- Progression step
- 5 kg once the top of the range is clean
- Skill
- Simple to learn
- Recovery cost
- Moderate
- Not prescribed if you have declared
- Knee, hip
Muscles worked
How to do it
Set the seat before you load it
You want to start with your knees comfortably bent and your lower back flat against the pad. If you are already curled up at the start, the seat is too close and every rep begins where it should end.
Feet about shoulder width on the platform
Mid platform, toes turned out slightly, whole foot in contact. Higher on the platform brings in more hip, lower brings in more knee. Pick one and keep it for the block so the numbers compare.
Lower under control to your own stopping point
Stop before the hips round off the pad. That is the cue on your wrist and it is the whole safety rule of this machine. The moment your tailbone lifts, the load has moved off your legs and onto your lower back.
Press without locking out hard
Drive through the whole foot until the legs are nearly straight. Snapping into a hard lockout puts the whole stack through a straight knee joint for no extra muscle.
What goes wrong
Chasing depth past where your pelvis stays down
Range of motion is worth having and this is not the place to buy it at any price. When the hips curl off the pad, your spine is flexing under a loaded sled. Find the depth where the pelvis stays flat, and get depth back by moving the seat rather than by rounding.
Cutting the range because the number is bigger
The leg press invites this more than any other lift, because adding plates is easy and the range is unwitnessed. It is a real loss: over twelve weeks a deep squatting group gained 4 to 7 per cent more front thigh cross-sectional area than a shallow one1. Half reps with more plates is a worse set that reads as a better one.
Using it as the whole leg day
It trains the legs and it does not train standing up under a load, bracing, or balance, because the machine does those for you. That is a fair trade when it is one exercise among several. It is a hole when it is the only one.
How Reckoner progresses this lift
Six weeks of this lift, from 100 kg, run through the real engine. Nothing below was typed in: the prescription, the decision and the sentence beside it all come from the same code that writes your week.
| Week | Prescribed | What it did |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 4 x 5 at 100 kg | More reps 5 → 6 repsYou finished every set at RPE 7, with room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
| 2 | 4 x 6 at 100 kg | More reps 6 → 7 repsYou finished every set at RPE 7, with room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
| 3 | 4 x 7 at 100 kg | More reps 7 → 8 repsYou finished every set at RPE 7, with room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
| 4 | 4 x 8 at 100 kg | Load up 100 kg → 105 kgYou hit the top of the range at RPE 7, so the bar goes up 5 kg to 105 kg and reps reset to five. |
| 5 | 4 x 5 at 105 kg | Deload 40% of sets offFive weeks of building, then one week lighter. About 40% of the sets come off. The load holds and your reps stay where you earned them, so you keep the strength and lose the fatigue. |
| 6 | 2 x 5 at 105 kg | More reps 5 → 6 repsYou finished every set at RPE 7, with room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. The lighter week is over, so this is back to four sets. |
Real engine output, not an illustration. Every row was produced by running the engine itself when this page was generated.
The full rule, and why the reps move before the load does, is in how Reckoner decides to add weight.
Questions people ask
Is the leg press as good as a squat?
For loading the quads hard with a supported back, it is genuinely useful. For everything a squat also asks of you, it is not, and no seated machine can be. Reckoner treats them as different movements with different records rather than as substitutes.
Should my knees come toward my chest?
Only as far as your pelvis stays flat on the pad. That point is set by your hips and your leg length, so it is yours to find and not a number anybody can hand you. Compressive force at the knee rises as the knee bends2, so the deepest position you can hold well is the target rather than the deepest position you can reach.
Will Reckoner give me this with a knee restriction?
No. Knee and hip are both recorded against it. Declare either in setup and it comes out of your plan.
Similar movements
Reckoner eases the load first when this lift stalls, and offers one of these only if it stalls again after that. A lift already as light as your kit goes has no load left to ease, so the offer comes straight away. Each of them has a page.
Sources
- Bloomquist and colleagues, European Journal of Applied Physiology, 2013. Effect of range of motion in heavy load squatting on muscle and tendon adaptations seventeen male students randomized to twelve weeks of deep squats to 120 degrees of knee flexion or shallow squats to 60 degrees, the deep group gaining 4 to 7 per cent more front thigh cross-sectional area and more isometric knee extension strength, and the shallow group's strength gain failing to carry into the deep squat
- Escamilla, Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise, 2001. Knee biomechanics of the dynamic squat exercise a review reporting that compressive force at the knee rises as the knee bends and peaks near full flexion, and that the parallel squat is not injurious to a healthy knee. Twenty-five years old, and its advice to prefer parallel over deep is superseded on that point by the 2013 review cited beside it