THE OG: Legs

Let's look in more depth at Vince's approach to training legs and get beyond his well-known hatred of the barbell back squat

Vince coaching the sissy squat (or possibly a Delinger squat)

Welcome back to the OG. After last week’s look at the sissy squat, we’ll be talking legs—minus calves—in more detail this week. Vince’s general approach to legs is his general approach to all body parts: everything in proportion. Most of all, with regard to the legs, that means paying attention to your body type and understanding that the barbell back squat is not a panacea for leg-development. In fact, overemphasis on the back squat may have a serious negative effect on your physique, widening and “spreading” your hips and buttocks and ruining the illusion of a v-taper from the shoulders down through the waist and hips to the legs.

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One thing I remember about my early days in this crazy world of bodybuilding is that you could always tell a Marcy man by the size of his thighs. They were huge!

Walt Marcyan, the originator of the famous Marcy equipment line, used to specialize at his gym in putting weight on guys in 30 days. He had his members do high-rep squats, 20 reps with four deep breaths between each one. Walt's staff counted the reps out loud and the thighs of the students grew by the week. You could hear the puffing and blowing a block away.

(Vince Gironda, The Wild Physique, p.119)

It was well understood, back in the Golden Age of Bodybuilding, that if you wanted to get big, one of the best ways to do so was to focus on training your legs. In particular, you needed to perform high-rep heavy squats and eat as much as possible.

This is the logic behind the famous “milk and squats” routine from the 1930s: You perform 20-rep sets of squats and add at least a gallon of milk to your diet each day. In a short period of time, you add significant mass not just to your legs, but to your entire body.

As the quotation above shows, Vince didn’t deny that this approach worked. Indeed, we’ve already seen that he recommended performing leg exercises before working the arms, to maximise arm growth. This really works, by the way. Vince knew it worked, from his own experience, but exercise scientists have actually tested it as well, and shown that you can increase biceps strength and size simply by performing a few 10-rep sets of leg exercise before you pump your guns.

However, Vince’s approach to legs was the same as his approach to every other body part; above all, an emphasis on proportion and development in the right places.

Muscles of the leg and foot

The main problem, for Vince, was that most bodybuilders didn’t develop their legs in a balanced fashion. They aimed for mass for mass’s sake, without caring enough about where the mass was going.

Here’s a list of the main considerations Vince believed should go in to training the legs:

Considerations should include balanced quads, adequate vastus internus and externus, a fully developed thigh biceps, upper-thigh detail of the adductors, the delineation of the sartorius, deep top-to-bottom separations, and enough definition to afford some evidence of cross-striations. (WP, p.119)

So we want two things, according to Vince:

1.      Balanced mass from the top to bottom of the leg, especially in the quads

2.      Visible separation of the muscles

Vince particularly admired the leg development of Monty Woolford, the man who taught him the sissy squat, because Woolford’s quadriceps were as developed at the knee as they were higher up, towards the hip. This gave Woolford’s legs a dramatic sweep that provided the illusion—remember what Vince said about “creating the illusion”—of being taller.

Monty Woolford on the cover of Health and Strength

It’s impossible to talk about Vince’s approach to leg-training without talking about barbell back squats. Vince is generally portrayed as hating the back squat, which isn’t strictly true. What Vince thought, in truth, was that the back squat is not the be-all-and-end-all of leg training. You shouldn’t just assume that doing back squats is enough to create powerful aesthetically pleasing legs. In fact, if you have the wrong body type, you might just make your physique worse by focusing too much on heavy back squats to the exclusion of other exercises that place mass where it’s needed on your legs. And remember, it’s about your legs, not about Tom Platz’s legs or Mike Mentzer’s legs. You are not Tom Platz or Mike Mentzer. You’re you.