Monday Morning: Quads & Breakfast

Good morning! In between homework breaks, I wanted to get a quick post up from my workout this morning. Mondays are my leg days and let me tell you my quads have been feeling it alllll day already. I'm slightly scared to see how I'm going to wake up tomorrow morning, but hey! It's all in the name of the gains, right?? 

Today I switched it up and instead of doing 3-4 sets of a lot of different exercises, I really wanted to make sure I was tiring out my quads by doing 6 sets of extremely heavy reps. I picked my three favorite exercises to target my quads which are leg extensions, smith machine lunges, and the leg press with a narrower leg stance (much more quad focused). Altering your leg stance can make all the difference with which area of your leg you want to hit. 

Then, I added in 3 accessory exercises at the end to really make sure my legs were toast! 

Lots of people ask what it means to "lift heavy" and honestly I don't think there's an actual range! It's all about what's heavy for YOU. Just for an idea here is some of the weight ranges that I use for my quads. Please note that this is going to look different to everyone depending on their experience level, I'm sure this will seem like warm-up sets to a lot of people! But I worked hard to get to this point so I'm proud :) 

Leg extensions: started out at 140lbs for 12, then 145 for 10, 150 for 8, and 160 for 6

Smith machine lunges: 70lbs for 12, 90 for 10, and 110 for 8

Narrow leg press: 200lbs for 15 (warm-up), 220 for 12, 240 for 10, 260 for 12, 320 for 6 

I went nice and slow (slower than usual) to really utilize each rep. If you truly want to risk not being able to walk, you can pause at the contraction, which is what I did and I'll probably regret it tomorrow. It'll be worth it, though, because my love for leg day is a little insane haha! 

After wobbling to the car and managing to drive home, I whipped up breakfast! Fresh chicken eggs and turkey bacon. Along with a waffle that I couldn't take a picture of because I was in desperate need for food, and couldn't wait for the bacon and eggs to cook. So that was gobbled up in approximately 0.2038 seconds. 

I have a couple of other posts that I'll work on getting up this week! I promise that I'm going to actually be a blogger, and write stuff on here haha!