The Leg Press

Part 1: Why and How

Mark Brown

April 5, 2022

The leg press can be a polarizing piece of gym equipment. It’s one of the best tools for lifters to get both strength and muscular development from one machine. It’s also one of the easiest ways for lifters to get in their own way through not keeping their ego in check. It’s been a major part of my leg development plan since I’ve been at the gym and one of my primary reasons for maintaining a gym membership over the last 2 years. It’s that important to me. The movement is fairly simple but to really help lifters out there understand why it’s part of a program to begin with I want to really dive into what makes it effective. This conversation cannot be held without comparisons to squats and deadlifts because of the nature of those movements and their importance.

For starters, a plate loaded leg press is a machine where plates are loaded on a connected to a platform that a lifter presses with their feet like they do a bar during a bench press. The lifter is seated at an angle looking up at the platform. Once the mechanism keeps the platform in place is unlocked, the legs take the load and the legs perform the presses. The placement of the plates on the machine means a lifter has to deal with both the weight and gravity when doing the lift. That places the leverage in a similar place to a squat but the two lifts are vastly different. The primary source of difference is that a leg press is externally supported and a squat is internally supported. Internal stability is when the body is used to support itself during a lift. This forces the entire body to handle the weight of whatever lift is being done. External stability is when a lifter uses other means to support the body. That could be belts, wraps, sleeves or, in the case of a leg press machine, a seat. What the seat does it that it allows the lifter to concentrate the load almost fully on the quadriceps, quite possibly the strongest muscle group in the human body, through absorbing the force of the load of weight and gravity on the back. That causes the quads to become the muscle group to be most isolated by the movement. One can change the forces involved by foot placement on the platform on to increase hamstring and glute involvement by placing them higher and wider on the pressing platform.

That external stability is what allows a lifter to leg press many times more than they can squat in a single rep. Depending on a lifter’s set and rep scheme, that can add up to tens of thousands of pounds difference when total workload is calculated. The easiest way I can show this is to use workload calculations from the first 2+ months of 2022:

Week 1: Low Bar Squat – 8,475 pounds; High Bar Squat – 8,560; Leg Press – 29,436.
Week 2: LBS – 8,445; HBS – 8,560; LP – 34,402.
Week 3: LBS – 10,830; HBS – 8,580, LP – 33,266
Week 4: LBS – 10,570; HBS – 10,120; LP – 30,870
Week 5: LBS – 10,800; HBS – 8,280; LP – 30,150
Week 6: LBS – 12,395; HBS – 14,080; LP – 32,080
Week 7: LBS – 14,080; HBS – 14,730; LP – 36,208
Week 8: LBS – 15,180; HBS – 15,950; LP -36,208
Week 9: LBS – 16,270; HBS – 14,730; LP – 38,064
High bar squat and leg press were performed during the same session.

Even when my low bar squat and high bar squat sessions are added up, which were done on Mondays and Fridays over the space of January and February 2022 respectively, those workload totals don’t really come close to the total weight lifted on leg press during that time frame. Furthermore, when I consider the fact that the vast majority of my squat lifts in this time frame, especially weeks 6-9, were done at 80% 1RM (345 pounds or above) for low reps compared to the near 1000 pound reps for 10-15 per set, it tells me how much more work can be done on a leg press than by squat. That is large part of why Sam Brown, a strongman competitor and coach who can be heard at EliteFTS’s Dave Tate’s Table Talk Podcast, asks “Do you actually want to learn how to squat or just look better naked?” when it comes to teaching people how to squat. He adds “there’s a leg press for that” in regards to just wanting to look better naked. A lifter can get strong, muscular legs doing leg press alone. Those numbers tell me that unequivocally.

When I add programming into the discussion, everything about the leg press kind of changes. Squats and deadlifts are major parts of any powerlifting or strength forward program, including weightlifting. They are both leg dominant lifts that require a lot of internal stability to complete, especially at higher loads. Both of them are leg presses at their core as well. Only differences are the leverage positions involved. The load to be moved is simply located in different spots, which makes the lifts different, even if both are hip hinge movements. When I realized that I was just using the floor as my anchor point to help move the load it hit me that I was doing a leg press. I first noticed it with deadlifts a couple years ago. The feeling my legs had when pulling the bar up past my knees to lock out screamed “leg press!” at me. Squats took a while longer for it to dawn on me. As a result, leg press has become a very important supplemental exercise because of the amount of workload that can be done with the lift to strengthen both lifts through improved stability, as shown above. I’ve even come up with ways to mimic the feeling leg presses give me in the garage. The lift has also helped me understand leverage better on this these two lifts by relating the way pushing nearly 1,000 pounds on the machine feels comparative to pushing all of my bodyweight and the load on my shoulders or hands into the floor to move my body. For squatters and deadlifters, leg press is almost mandatory.

Where the lift fits into a program really depends on what the goals of program are. If its goal is development of the squat and deadlift, then a leg press will firmly be a supplemental or accessory lift. I usually squat, deadlift then leg press to really get after my upper legs. I tend to lean towards supplemental rather than the accessory. I want to put as much weight on the machine as I can. I don’t see a point in doing any load I can’t do at least mostly full 8 reps of. This is a lift that one can easily get both strength and muscular development simultaneously. For a person who is more concentrating on hypertrophy, it is very useful as a main lift because of the way it mainly isolates the quadricep while allowing for bigger loads. It’s the only lift that can really say that about. I would also note that squatting after heavy leg press sets may cause some safety concerns. This is for people who want to prioritize strength development but maintain the skill of squatting. It’s similar to the way I felt in 2018-19 when I noticed that heavy dumbbell press sets murdered my ability to bench press significant weight safely because they exhausted my pectoral and tricep muscles. I was legitimately worried that the bar would come back down my chest or neck. A heavy leg press could produce a similar situation with a squat. Failed deadlifts can be dropped without much repercussion. Failed squats are another thing altogether because where the load is in relation to the body. Tiring the quads out to high level on the leg press could result in causing a lifter to fail a squat, probably at the bottom. A lot of bad things can happen in that position.

The leg press machine does the job it is designed to do well, but those things do come with a cost. Doing such heavy presses on the machine can cause some soreness in the knees because of the way the knees bear the weight of the load like a squat. Ideally, a lifter would like to the load isolate entirely on the muscle, not the joint, but that’s just not how the body works. Leg presses get an undeserved reputation for “wrecking” or “destroying” knees, in my opinion. Lifts on the machine that are done at loads well above what the lifter can handle, which usually means low reps or very partial reps, are more the culprit in those knee cases. Partial reps aren’t terrible on a leg press, because that’s part of what the machine was designed to do in the first place. Doing partial reps or limited range of motion lifts is an essential part of any strength training program.

Another part of the polarizing nature of the machine is something that I mentioned in the above paragraph. The lift isn’t a technique driven movement, although there are ways of making it do different things. It is purely about training the legs to push as much weight as they can. A more technical term those reading this might have heard for this is “output.” That makes the lift easy for someone to use the lift as a barometer for how powerful their legs are. It takes a lot of discipline to keep from venturing into the “ego lifting” territory on leg press. It’s very easy for a lifter to see how many full plates they can put on the machine and press after successful heavy sets. I fell into the trap once around 2018 when I decided to see just how much I could push. I found my answer: 1,158 pounds for 4 reps. I felt so stupid after doing it and think it’s even dumber now. The primary reason for that feeling is that I ask myself what the benefit of that particular lift was. I can’t come up with anything besides it making me feel super strong, aka inflating my ego. Belief is amongst the most important tools for lifters, but artificially boosting it will only hinder progress and increase the chance of injury. The leg press just happens to be one of the easiest machines to ego lift on in the gym because it is such a purpose driven machine. As a result, some people just look at the lift as a way that other lifters use to draw attention to themselves. In some cases, they aren’t not be wrong.

Come back for part 2 Thursday when I go over some of the potential dangers involved with the lift.