Written by Team MD

23 July 2019

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Building Legendary Legs

How Kai Greene & Jay Cutler Did It

Instinct

Kai Greene Feels His Way to Freaky Quads

When you watch Kai’s leg workout, it gets confusing and you start asking a lot of questions. Why is he doing that now? What’s he going to do next? Does this make any sense?

These questions are natural when a guy with RIDICULOUS leg development is doing a workout that contradicts 99 percent of the workouts other top bodybuilders preach. And it turns out that he knows exactly what he’s doing. In fact, he might have come up with the most intelligent training strategy there is.

When most bodybuilders realize they need to improve something, they scramble for advice. Hire a coach, read a magazine, ask a friend … for some reason we always look outside ourselves for an answer that can only be within. Kai Greene did the opposite: he looked within for the answers that had been there all along. Kai very carefully and critically looked at himself and decided exactly what parts of his legs needed improvements. He then constructed a training program that put the weak areas first and his strengths at the end of the workout.

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Kai also focused on balance and not excess. Instead of doing the same quad-blasting workout and trying to improve his hams at the same time, he reshuffled the workout so his quads were less of a priority. They still get worked pretty damn hard, but not with the same intensity and energy he applies to his hamstrings. With this strategy, his legs will balance out just as he envisioned.

Kai’s instinct told him that what he was doing was wrong and his intellect provided the solution. He knew he didn’t need to do heavy squats or any quad work at the start of a workout, but he kept reading and hearing otherwise. Finally he decided to trust himself and his countless hours in the gym. The result is a great set of wheels.

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Learn to Use Your Instinct on Leg Day for a Kai-style Workout!

1. Assess your legs from bottom to top, side-to-side and front to back to see what needs the most work. Start with the big picture and assess your quads, hams, glutes and calves. List them in order with (1) being the area that needs the most work. Then take each of these groups and break them down into smaller parts (inner thigh, quad sweep, glute-ham tie-in, etc.). Now you’ve got the start of a plan that will form your workouts.

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2. Work the different leg muscles in the order of worst to best. So if your hamstrings are overpowered by your quads, start the workout with hams. There is no rule that says you have to start with quads; the only rule is that you make yourself better than you were the day before.

3. Go one step further and create priorities within the muscle groups. If you need more quad sweep, then start the workout with a hack squat using a close stance. If you need more inner thigh, try squatting with a wide stance. Again, customize the workout to be what YOU need.

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4. Feel the muscle moving the weight. Heavy is a relative term … Kai’s goal is to get a certain feel and he only uses as much weight as it takes to get there. Step away from everything you’ve been doing to this point and really think about each rep. Feel the stretch, the contraction and everything in between.

5. The goal is to create an effective workout that will improve your physique, not anyone else’s. So your new “Kai-style” plan might be different than how you’ve ever trained. If you don’t embrace the change and accept what is new and different, you will never change your legs.

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TYPICAL KAI WORKOUT

1. Lying Leg Curls: 4 sets of 15-20 reps

2. Standing One-leg Curls: 4 sets of 12-15 reps

3. Stiff Legs: 4 sets of 15-20 reps

4. Walking Lunges: 3 sets of approx 40 yards

5. Leg Extensions: 4 sets of 20, 15, 12, 12 reps

6. Squats: 4 sets of 20, 15, 12, 12 reps

7. Leg Press: 4 sets of 15-20 reps

THINK ABOUT IT

Jay Cutler’s Path From Big Legs to Great Legs Was Carefully Planned

Jay Cutler had big legs before he ever entered a gym, and training only made them bigger and better. His legs were good going back to his first contest as a teenager. But a lot of bodybuilders come along with good legs, and few manage to be called great. Those few have something more. For Jay, that something more has been his intelligence and execution.

Earlier in 2012, we named Jay Cutler the greatest bodybuilder of the past 10 years. During that decade he never finished worse than second in any contest he entered. You can’t be that good with that level of consistency by accident. By the same token, his good legs became great a long time ago and have continued to improve each year.

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Every workout, every set and every rep has a purpose and it’s a purpose Jay determines before it starts. And then he executes that purpose with precision. Jay’s mind is controlling the workout and he’s thinking the whole way through. When you stop thinking you start wasting time, and you also stop being careful. Jay’s got too many other jobs to waste time and he could never have had such consistency onstage if he was getting injured.

Watching Jay Cutler perform a set of leg presses is very symbolic of his approach to training and his career: every rep is effective and Jay is always in total control of the weight and his muscles. The closer you look, the more you can see happening. The subtle pause at the bottom, the tension in the middle and the squeeze at the top are creating an intensity that’s creating growth.

What are you thinking about during a set of leg presses? Do you actually think about every inch of every rep or are you just moving weight? It takes unparalleled concentration and ability to block out the rest of the world; but if you can do it you can build some great legs of your own.

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Think Like Jay on Your Next Leg Day!

1. One more time: every workout, every set and every rep is a chance to grow and you have to think to make it happen. Don’t just set your mind on a rep range and mindlessly count— slow down and connect your mind to your legs. Force them to grow through your actions and don’t just hope they will because you walked into the gym.

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2. You can’t grow if you’re injured, so stop using weight that’s likely to cause pain (the bad kind). If squatting six plates is causing knee pain that’s so bad you have to miss every other workout, then is it really worth it? Just think abut how your legs might look if you squatted four plates every week for more reps and no knee pain. Jay didn’t place first or second in every contest for 10 years by training dumb.

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3. Use a full and controlled range of motion on every set. Only your muscles know what is heavy and they will tell you. Set your mind on the perfect rep and never compromise that form. The goal is to hit the desired rep range using as much weight as possible while executing each rep to perfection. When form gets compromised, so do your gains.

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4. Attack the legs from all angles. Jay’s legs are big and make up of a ton of little muscles. To make each of them grow, you can’t leave any stone unturned. That’s why Jay does things like two different kinds of leg presses and three different types of leg curls. Each new angle is a new chance to grow.

5. The goal is to build great legs— not to create the shortest workout possible. You need to use enough exercises to hit all of the angles and enough sets to fully stimulate the muscles firing on each move. In the workout below, Jay Cutler needed 37 sets to effectively train his legs— so how can you explain doing a lot less?

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