QUAD SIZE TRAINING TIPS
Here are some helpful tips for your quad training. Please note that these are averages based on my experience working with lots of clients and our own training. The recommendations here should be food for thought or places to start, not dogmatic scriptures to follow to the letter.
Before we start, here are some terms to help understand all the guidance and advice:
1) Macrocycle = Multiple training phases
2) Mesocycle = One to three training phases in the macrocycle
3) Microcycle = one session/one week/one phase in the mesocycle
Now legs talk quads…
MV = Maintenance Volume:
Perhaps around 6 sets per week are needed to maintain quad size for experienced trainers. It might be a slightly higher volume if you’re very physically active on your feet because the anabolic stimulus of lifting has to compete with the catabolic stimulus of low-intensity physical activity. We recommend 2 weekly sessions for maintenance, so that’s 3 sets per session, but you can probably get away with one weekly quad session for 6 sets and still maintain an isocaloric state and can do up to 3 sessions at 2 sets each as well.
MEV = Minimum Effective Volume:
Most intermediate-advanced lifters need at least 8 sets of direct quad work per week to make gains, and for some, it’s even more than that. If you’re training twice a week, that’s about 4 sets per session. It’s about 2-3 sets per session for 3x training, 2 sets for 4x training, and 1-2 sets or so for 5x or 6x training.
MAV = Maximum Adaptive Volume:
The maximum adaptive volume of a single session of any trained muscle group is still speculative, but research suggests it’s probably no lower than 4 working sets per session and no higher than 12 working sets per session in most intermediates. When you design your program and progressions, having lots of sessions with much fewer than 4 working sets per muscle group per session for multiple weeks on end might not be very efficient, and you might benefit from combining a few of these lower volume sessions to get the same volume but in fewer weekly sessions. Also, not exceeding 12 sets per session per muscle group for more than a few weeks is probably a good idea.
MRV = Maximum Recoverable Volume:
The MRV depends highly on the number of sessions per week. With 2 sessions, the average intermediate MRV for quads might be around 18 sets per week. With three sessions, it’s closer to 22 sets per week. With 4 sessions, it’s around 26 sets, and with 5 or 6 weekly sessions, it might be as high as 30 sets per week in many cases. Exercise selection has a huge effect on quad MRVs, whereby lots of squatting usually causes lower MRVs via added fatigue, but lots of leg extensions cause much less fatigue and thus can create much higher MRVs, with leg presses and hack squats being somewhere between the two. In addition, quad training, especially when composed of lots of squatting, can be much more systemically fatiguing than other muscle group training.
This is to say the creation of a quad training program should not only pay attention to the local recovery ability of the quads themselves but should also pay special attention to their effect on systemic recovery.
VARIATION
Within a training session, we recommend including between 1 and 3 different quad exercises, but no more than that in most cases, as doing more than 3 quad movements in one session is likely just a needless burning of potential exercise variations you can save for later mesocycles. Within a single week (microcycle) of training, we recommend between 2 and 5 different quad exercises. For example, if you train quads 3x a week, you can do a heavy barbell squat on one day, a lighter barbell squat on the next day, and a leg press version on the last day for 2 total exercises in the week. On the other hand, if you train quad 6x per week, you might want to choose (though don’t have to choose) as many as 5 different exercises, with only one of them repeated in a heavier/lighter arrangement. Because you want to keep exercises variations fresh for when you need to change exercises (through injury or staleness, for example), you should use as few exercises per week (and thus, per mesocycle, as we recommend keeping the same exercises in every week of each meso) as you can to get the job done. If you can just do a few more sets of barbell squats and get a great workout, there’s no reason to switch to hack squats, for example. If you’re doing an exercise, there should be a reason for it.
Over multiple mesocycles of training, you should seek to include different foot stances in your presses (hacks, squats, leg presses) to target not only the quads themselves but the many other muscles in your legs that “quad training” targets, such as the adductors. In addition, you should also at least occasionally do some form of leg extension, as it might target portions of your quads that squats do not.
Lastly, how do you know when it’s time to switch out a given exercise from your rotation to another exercise in your list of effective choices? The decision is based on answering just a few questions about the exercise you’re currently using:
Are you still making gains in rep strength on the exercise?
Is the exercise causing any aches or pains that are connective tissue related? And are these getting worse with each week or several weeks?
Is there a phasic need for the exercise to change? In other words, is the exercise appropriate for the rep range you’re trying to use it for? Example: barbell squats for sets of 25 just tire out your lower back, but leg extensions for 25 pump up your quads as intended.
Are you getting a good mind-muscle connection on the exercise, or is it feeling stale and annoying to do?
If you are still hitting PRs on the exercise, it’s not causing any undue pains, you’re getting a good mind-muscle connection, and there’s no other need to change it, then don’t change it! If this means you keep an exercise around for up to a year or more, so be it! But if an exercise isn’t yielding any more PRs for a whole meso (especially on a muscle gain or maintenance phase), if it’s hurting you in the “bad” way, if it feels super stale, and/or if you have to dump it because it’s not appropriate to an upcoming rep range target, then you should replace it. Many times, the questions will fall on both sides, and then it’s up to you to make a wise choice considering all the 4 variables above.
RANGE OF MOTION
Let’s face facts. Training quads with a full range of motion SUCKS. It’s brutal, painful, and each rep seems to take forever. But if you want maximum growth, there’s no other way. This means that you should likely invest in Olympic Weightlifting shoes and control every rep ALL the way down. Squats done deep enough to get your butt to your calves, leg presses so deep that (with a tight lower back) your knees are just lateral to your chest, and so on. For some exercises like hack squats and leg presses, you’ll need to bring your stance in and down on the platform, and that WILL reduce how much weight you can do, but that’s just a part of the dance! Remember that stretch under load is an independent driver of hypertrophy, so when you’re wondering why the hell you’re going so deep on quad moves, just remind yourself that there’s something down there you’re after… and that something is the deep, painful tearing of quad tissue that literally causes muscle growth.
LOADING
In general, like all muscles, the muscles of the quads benefit from weights in the 30%-85% 1RM range, which in many people roughly translates to a weight that results in between 5 and 30 reps on a first set taken to failure. We can split this range into heavy (5-10,) moderate (10-20), and light (20-30) categories, as there are tradeoffs to make between all of them.
The first point on loading is that the quads, like most muscles, seem to benefit from some training in all three of the rep ranges listed above. Because the moderate (10-20 rep) range often offers the best tradeoff between stimulus, fatigue, injury risk, and slow/fast fiber specificity, and mind-muscle connection, an argument can be made that a first-time program design could have most weekly working sets for the quad in this range, perhaps up to about 50% of them. The other 50% can perhaps be split evenly between the heavy (5-10) and light (20-30) rep ranges, as loading range diversity has been shown to be a potential benefit in its own right. That being said, many people will experience about the same balance of stimulus to fatigue in all three of the main rep ranges for quad training.
Quad exercises that rely on active postural support are not conducive to the best training in the 20-30 or even in the high end of the 10-20 range. Squats and hack squats are best saved for the 5-15 rep ranges for this reason. On the other hand, doing leg extensions with loads heavy enough to produce sets of 5-10 reps is often needlessly stressful to the knees, and such isolation moves are probably best done in the 10-20 and even 20-30 ranges. Generally, the more compound the movement, the more it’s ideal for lower reps, and the more isolation, the better it is for higher reps. Squats should probably be done the heaviest, then hack squats and smith machine squats, then leg presses (which have the widest range of safe and effective loads), and finally leg extensions.
When constructing a weekly training plan, it’s probably a good idea to train the heavy ranges before the lighter ranges. Because both types of training cause fatigue, they all interfere with each other to some extent. However, the muscle and connective tissue damage from heavier training is likely more substantial and presents a higher risk of injury if some damage already exists from earlier training. Thus, if you do sets of 5-10 on Monday and (nearly always) sustain some form of micro-tearing, sets of 10-20 on Wednesday are lower in absolute force magnitude and are unlikely to cause the micro-tearing to expand into a notable injury. On the other hand, if you’re pre-damaged from lots of sets of 10-20 on Monday, going even heavier in such a state on Wednesday in the 5-10 range is a bit more likely to result in injury. Thus, a potential sequencing of heavy-moderate-light during the week might be advisable, with a day or two of extra rest after the light session and before the next heavy session to make sure most damage has been healed and another productive week can begin.
A sample arrangement of exercises, sets, and loads can look something like this:
Monday:
Squats 3 sets, 5-10 reps
Hack Squats 3 sets, 5-10 reps
Wednesday:
Hack Squats 3 sets, 10-20 reps
Leg Presses 3 sets, 10-20 reps
Friday:
Leg Extensions 3 sets, 20-30 reps
Leg Presses 3 sets, 20-30 reps
Based on your personal responses to each of the main rep ranges, you can adjust how much volume you perform in any of them. For example, if you notice that you get a better stimulus (pumps, soreness, mind-muscle connection, etc.) and lower fatigue (joint stress, systemic fatigue, joint soreness, etc.) in some of the ranges vs. others, you can do more sets in those ranges and a bit less in others, though you should in most cases still include at least some work in the least productive ranges. For example, you might find that neither 5-10 nor 20-30 rep ranges work very well for your quad training, so you might only do a few sets of both in most weeks and do the vast majority of your sets in the 10-20 range.
REST TIMES
When determining how long to rest between any two sets in training, our goal is for enough rest to be taken such that the next set is at least close to maximally productive. How can we ensure this? By answering 4 basic questions about our recovery status:
Has the target muscle locally recovered to do at least 5 reps on the next set?
Has the nervous system recovered enough to remove it as a limiting factor to target muscle performance?
Has the cardiorespiratory system recovered enough to remove it as a limiting factor to target muscle performance?
Have synergist muscles in the exercise being performed recovered enough to remove them as a limiting factor to target muscle performance?
It might take only 1-2 minutes to recover very well (let’s say, 90%) on all of those factors, but because set to set recovery is asymptotic in nature, it might take another 3 minutes to get to 95% recovery and another 10 minutes more to get to 99% recovery. Since you only have so much time to spend in the gym, 10 “90% recovered sets” in 45 minutes of training is a much more anabolic stimulus than only 3 “99% recovered” sets in that same amount of time. Thus, our recommendation is to make sure you can clearly check all 4 boxes of recovery above, but to not wait for much longer than what can be considered “very good” recovery in the incredibly inefficient quest for “near-perfect recovery.”
Here’s an example of what can be considered “very good” recovery between sets of quad training. Before you do another set of squats, ask yourself:
Are my quads still burning from the last set, or do they feel ok again?
Do I feel like I can push hard with my quads again, and I am mentally ready for another hard set, or do I need more time to rest?
Is my breathing more or less back to normal, or is it still very heavy?
Are my glutes and lower back still very fatigued, or are they ready to support my quads in the upcoming set of squats?
If you can get the green light on all of these, you’re probably ready to do another set, and waiting much longer will almost certainly not be of benefit.
You’ll notice that depending on the exercise and on the lifter, very different rest times will be generated by this questionnaire. For example, seated leg extensions might not even have synergist muscles, so question 4 doesn’t even apply, and rest times can be less than 30 seconds, whereas barbell squats might need 3 minutes between sets just to regain normal breathing. And if you’re on the larger and stronger side of things, and your cardio isn’t great, you’ll be resting much longer than someone smaller, not as strong, and in excellent cardio shape. While average rest times between sets of quads training will be between 30 seconds and 3 minutes, the most important consideration is to take the rest time you need, and not copy someone else’s, rush the process, or sit around needlessly for minutes after all 4 factors are good to go for your next set to commence.
FREQUENCY
There are two main considerations for determining training frequency. The first is the duration of the increase in muscle growth seen after a bout of training between MEV and MRV. If such an increase in muscle growth lasts 7 days, then perhaps a once-a-week frequency is optimal. If such an increase lasts only a day, then perhaps 6 days a week for the same muscle group is much better. While direct research on muscle growth timecourses is very limited, it seems that typical training might cause a reliable 24-48 hour increase in muscle growth. This would mean that if muscle growth elevation was the only variable of concern with regards to frequency, we should train every muscle 3-6 times per week.
However, the second main consideration in determining training frequency is recovery. A single bout of training between MEV and MRV causes muscle growth to occur, but it also presents some degree of fatigue. If we are to progress in training and allow adaptations to fully take hold over days and weeks, we must allow enough time to elapse between overloading sessions for at least most fatigue to dissipate. On average, the exact amount of fatigue dissipation must be at least enough to allow performance to return to baseline or higher, such that an overload can be presented. In other words, if you can normally leg press 405 for 15 reps, asking yourself “when should my next quad workout be after this last one” can be answered by “when will you be recovered enough to be able to leg press at least 405 for 15 reps?” The time course of fatigue is usually a bit longer than that of muscle growth, unfortunately, so that for most people, recovery, not muscle growth cessation, will be the limiting factor on frequency. In most per-session MEV-MRV training volumes, fatigue will take between 1-2 days to come back down enough to restore or improve on past performance, and that highly depends on the muscle in question and even the exercises used.
How do you determine what training frequency is appropriate for you? You can start by training your quads at per-session MEV volumes. After each session, you note when soreness has abated and when you feel recovered enough psychologically to attempt another overloading workout. When you’re ready, and no later, go back to the gym and train quads again, with volumes just a bit higher than MEV (using the RP Set Progression Algorithm). If you’re recovering on time, keep coming back and training your quads as often as you have been. If you notice that you need more time to recover, add a day to your next post-quad-training window. If you’re recovering faster than you thought you could, train a bit more often. After a mesocycle of such adjustments, you will have a rough but very good guess as to what your average quad training frequency can be for most of your programs going forward. In fact, your frequency will not only be tailored exactly to your responses, but you’ll be pretty sure it’s close to optimal because it was literally derived from how fast you can recover; which is the very primary variable that determines the frequency.
Just so that you have some expectation of where to start, most individuals can recover from quad training at a time course that allows for 2-5 sessions of quads per week at MEV-MRV volumes. However, only through direct experimentation on yourself can you tell where in this range is best for you and if maybe you’re even outside of this range. Just remember that so long as you’re recovered to train again (can perform at or above normal levels), training is a better idea than waiting to train, because higher frequency programs, at least in the short term, have shown to generate more muscle growth than needlessly lower ones.
To improve your training frequency, you can alternate exercise selections between successive quad workouts. For example, if you do leg presses one day, you might do squats or hack squats the next day, and so on. This rotation of slightly different exercises and movement patterns can take repeated stress off of very small and specific parts of your muscles and connective tissues, which might reduce chronic injury risk exposure.
Please note that when you’re determining your quad training frequency, you’ll have to juggle it a bit with your glute training frequency, as unrecovered quads can impede your glute training, and even glute training itself can tax your quads enough to require a frequency reduction for direct quad training.
PERIODIZATION
There are a few relevant timescales in periodization:
The repetition (1-9 seconds)
The set (5-30 repetitions)
The exercise (1-5 sets)
The session (2-6 exercises)
The day (0-2 sessions)
The microcycle (usually 1 week of training)
The mesocycle (3-12 weeks)
The block (1-4 mesocycles)
The macrocycle (1-4 blocks)
We’ve already covered the most important details on most of these timescales, so in this section, we’ll focus on a brief understanding of how to manipulate training over a typical mesocycle and training block.
A mesocycle is composed of two phases: the accumulation phase and the deload phase. The accumulation phase lasts as long as it takes to hit systemic MRV, which, because fatigue accumulates in MEV+ training, has to happen at some point. For beginners with very high recovery abilities, it can take up to 12 weeks of increasingly more demanding training for systemic MRV to be reached and a deload to be required. For very advanced lifters that have very strong, large, and volume-resistant muscles, it can take only 3-4 weeks of accumulation training to reach systemic MRV and need to deload. The deload phase is designed to bring down the fatigue from the accumulation phase, and it usually only lasts a week or so (one microcycle).
When you begin a mesocycle of training, you should probably begin at or close to your MEV for all the muscle groups you’d like to improve during that mesocycle.
If you can’t really add weight each week, you can add reps. This might happen when, for example, you are using the 25kg dumbbells one week and then having to do the 27.5kg next week, wildly slashing your reps. Just remember to stay within your general rep range and not leave it in any given meso. If you start at sets of about 5 reps, don’t add any more reps than will give you sets of 10, because that will take you out of the 5-10 range and no longer fulfill the needs of your training program in the way it was intended. If you start to exit a range by adding reps, add weight to take yourself back into that range, even if the increments are big and take you all the way down to the bottom of the range. Yes, this might mean that last week you were doing 20 reps with the 20kg dumbbells on your first set, and this week you’re back to only 10 reps with the 25kgs at the same or one less RIR, but that’s proper training!
Once you cannot tie previous reps in at least two consecutive sessions for a given muscle group, you have likely hit its local MRV and need to reduce its training volume. Our recommendation is to take the next planned session with half of the planned working sets, half of the planned reps, and half of the load for recovery. In the session after, resume your load progression from before, but start at a number of sets halfway between where you started the meso and your MRV set number, and an RIR of around 2. Thus, for example, if you hit 100kg for 10 reps on a first set last session (6 total sets in the session for that muscle group), whereas the week before, you hit 95kg for 12 reps, your next workout can be 50kg for 3 sets of about 5 reps. Then, next week, you resume with 105kg, but shoot for 2 RIR and do 4 sets total, because you started the meso at 2 sets, and 4 is halfway between 2 and 6 sets. Continue to train normally after that until and unless you hit MRV again.
Systemic MRV is when you’re training so hard that your sleep quality declines, your appetite falls, and you might get sick more often. It’s also when nearly all of your muscles start to hit local MRVs at about the same time. Once that happens (and be honest with yourself when it does), stop the accumulation phase and begin the deload phase.
The deload can be done in many ways, but our recommendation is to take sets to MEV for the whole week. The load should be week 1’s load for the first half of the week and ½ of week 1’s load for the second half. The reps should be roughly half of all week 1’s reps for all sets during the deload week. This makes the deload VERY EASY, which is the whole point since hard training doesn’t bring down fatigue! You should feel refreshed and be craving hard training toward the end of your deload week if you’re setting it up correctly.
Those are the basics of periodization over the mesocycle. The training block is a sequence of mesocycles strung together for one unifying purpose. For example, a muscle gain block maybe 3 mesocycles of 6 weeks each, one after another, with weight gain the goal for all 18 of those total weeks, or a fat loss block might be 2 mesocycles of 5 weeks long during which weight loss is the goal for all 10 of those weeks.
Though we can potentially alter all training variables over a training block, frequency, exercise selection, and loading are definitely noteworthy.
Frequency:
When you start a training block, your MEVs are very low and so are your weekly MRVs. Thus, you can fit your total training volume relatively easily into lower frequencies, such as 2x per week per muscle group, for example. As training progresses and you start your next meso, not only do your per-session MEVs go up, but your weekly MRVs go up as well, making fitting all your training into just a few sessions more difficult. As well, you’re now quite used to the exercises, and recovery between sessions occurs much faster, allowing a higher frequency microcycle to be much more realistic. At this point, you can increase your frequency a bit, perhaps to an average of something like 3x per muscle group, for example. In the last one or two Mesos, your per-session MEVs are very high and your per-week MRVs even higher. To really get the best gains, another bump in frequency is recommended, and you might go to 4x or so training per muscle group, and perhaps even higher.
Unfortunately, super high frequencies might not be the most sustainable for a couple of reasons. First, muscles heal faster than connective tissues, and if you train with very high frequencies, sometimes your connective tissue recovery can lag behind your muscle recovery, which may set you up for injuries if unabated. Secondly, the sheer weekly volume that higher frequencies let you do productively might cause so much fatigue escalation as to not be sustainable for longer than a mesocycle or two. Thus, after training for a meso or two at your highest frequency, you might end the training block and seek to reduce the very high fatigue levels you have accumulated, in part by starting whatever phase you start next at lower frequencies.
Exercise Selection:
For normal exercise selection decisions, you can just follow the 4-part exercise deletion and replacement guidelines in the variation section above. But as you add sessions from meso to meso with a climbing frequency, you’ll need to consider adding exercises. Yes, you can repeat exercises a few times in the week with different loads, but we recommend doing this sparingly, and more often adding in new exercises when you add new sessions as frequency climbs. Thus, you might start with an exercise on Monday and a different one on Thursday in a 2x meso, but when you move to 3x, you might have to add a new exercise on Friday, keeping the Monday exercise the same and moving the Thursday exercise to Wednesday. Because fatigue and wear and tear increase with each meso in a block, we recommend adding less systemically disruptive exercises more often than adding more disruptive ones. For example, you might consider adding some leg extensions on that Friday 3x session but adding barbell squats to an already fatiguing week of quad training might be overkill. Yes, you can add very tough movements as you go, but we recommend against it in most cases. Thus, you start with pretty much only or mostly basic, high-stress moves such as barbell squats and hack squats earlier in the block, and later on add leg presses, leg extensions, and other such less fatiguing exercises as you add in sessions to expand frequency over the training block.
Loading:
Whatever exercises you’ve carried over from one meso to the next should be done in the same rep ranges as they were done in the last mesos. For example, if you did barbell squats in the 5-10 rep range on a first set in the last meso, in the next meso, you should continue your loading progression to stay in that same rep range, which often means just adding small increments of weight from where you last left off in the last meso or lightening up the weight just enough to get similar reps at 3-4 RIR again in the first week. But for new exercises added in each meso as frequency goes up, we recommend adding in the moderate (10-20) and light (20-30) rep ranges instead of the heavy (5-10) range. This recommendation occurs for two reasons. First, as you take on more wear and tear and fatigue, adding more 5-10 rep movements might cause a large increase in injury risk, especially now that you’re asking your body to perform with such heavy loads with even less recovery time between sessions. Secondly, very high rep (20-30) training seems to cause robust gains over a meso or two, but in part, because your body adapts to buffering metabolites so quickly, might not work nearly as well for much longer. Thus, you may want to start with heavier training in the first meso of a block, keep it for all remaining mesos, and add in lighter training with new sessions as you go, which also pairs well with the selection of less fatiguing exercises. Here’s an example of how that might look for the quads:
Meso 1:
Monday Barbell Squats (5-10)
Thursday Hack Squats (10-20)
Meso 2:
Monday Barbell Squats (5-10)
Wednesday Hack Squats (10-20)
Friday Leg Presses (10-20)
Meso 3:
Monday Barbell Squats (5-10)
Wednesday Hack Squats (10-20)
Friday Leg Presses (10-20)
Saturday Leg Extensions (20-30)
Once you’ve done a whole training block, you can do a mesocycle of low frequency (2x) training at MV with mostly 5-10 rep ranges and compound movements to resensitize your muscles to volume and growth again. This meso can take about a month and can be good to pair with maintenance eating to bring down any diet fatigue you might have from hard dieting in the last block. If you don’t have any real diet fatigue, you can instead take around 2 weeks of active rest (sometimes just one week if you count the deload after your last meso), where you train with 1x frequency for every muscle, with only about 2 working sets per muscle per session, and with weights that are around 50% of your 5-10 range, but doing them for only 5-10 reps per set. This ultra-easy training can make you ready for another whole block of training in the gym and can even be replaced with no training at all if you’re feeling really beat up or tired. Once you’ve taken this easy time, you’re probably ready to give another training block ago!
