Quad Exercises Ranked (BEST TO WORST!)
There are so many quad exercises, but which ones should you be focusing your efforts on if you want to build bigger quads and increase your strength? In this video, I’m going to give you the most popular quad exercises ranked from worst to best and help you to determine which you should be doing and
And that’s why squat is anything but at the top and why I have to break out my red marker to put it in the worst of the worst.
What’s up, guys, Jeff Cavaliere, Athleanx. com. What you see behind me is a bunch of different quad exercises, many of which you either do right now or you did in the past. However, after today, you may want to get rid of a few of them. Because what I’m going to do is going to help you by ranking them from the worst to the best, to show you the only ones that you need to focus on to get the gains that you’re after.
And so as with every other video in this series, when we’re ranking these exercises, we have to have some common criteria so we can rank them effectively. And when we’re talking about quads, I am speaking about exercises that do the best at building specifically the quads and not just overall leg development. So, we’re looking for exercises that: a) can create hypertrophy and muscle growth; b) are capable of being overloaded and progressively overloaded in one or three ways; and then finally c) the ability to do the exercise safely. Because no matter how much you want to get bigger legs, if you break your legs down in the process, it’s not worth it. And so, I kick this list off at the bottom in the Worst of the Worst Category when we’re talking about the Sissy Squat.
And maybe some of you have never even seen the exercise before, and that’s probably a good thing. But ironically, while this could be a knee shredder, it could also be a good patellar tendon accommodation exercise. In other words, you can build up the strength of your tendons, but you have to approach it in a completely different way than most people who do the exercise. Meaning slowly and with an unweighted, deliberate progression. Oftentimes people will throw a plate across their chest and use this as a hypertrophy exercise.
Let’s face it, guys, that’s never going to create the hypertrophy you’re looking for. And for that reason, all the others, it s going to get the big red X in the Worst of the Worst Category. And that brings me to the next and the Worst of the Worst Category, this time we’re talking about the Squat. But hold off, we’re not talking about just any squat, we’re talking about the Smith Machine Squat. And there’s a very good reason why you shouldn’t even be wasting your time, because this is not the way to squat.
We understand that the best path for the bar on a squat is vertical but doing it on a Smith Machine is going to force your verticality to happen in a way that you don’t want it to. In other words, biomechanically, we’re all a little bit different. Some have longer femurs, some have longer tibia, some have longer torsos than others. The way we get down to the bottom of the squat and maintain a vertical position requires a little bit of movement at each of these joints and areas of the body at different times. Doing it on a Smith Machine requires us all to sort of bend at the same place at the same time, causing a disruption in normal biomechanics.
This belongs in the Worst of the Worst. Just avoid them. And so, with that, we now work our way up into the Better Category. And here we’re talking about good solid exercise choices, just not the Best of the Best. And I’ll point out the reasons why.
And we start off with the Dumbbell Drop Squat. And this is actually one of my favorite ways to do a squat, especially for beginners. Why? Because it takes away all the guesswork. If you simply hold the dumbbell by its end and let it go where it wants to go, which is straight down, it’s going to actually biomechanically fix the amount of hip flexion and knee flexion that you need to contribute to the exercise to do it properly.
So, think of it as somewhat of an automatic form fixture for the exercise. The issue, however, is load. There’s not a whole hell of a lot of load that you can handle with a dumbbell like this, but there is something that’s going to replace it at a much later time in this list. For now, we just give it the blue circle for the first and the Better Category. And so along that same vein, instead of having that dumbbell down between your legs, you can just lift it up and put it right about here and do a Goblet Squat, and it’s up next in our Better Category.
But there are some limitations here too, mostly that people will likely fatigue more in the thoracic spine, the capability of holding that upright posture long before their quads ever do. But do realize this you can build muscle even at higher rep ranges as long as you’re taking that exercise to failure. So even if you do a heavy goblet squat, let’s say 100 pounds and you could do 25 repetitions to failure, you’ve got an option for building your quads. But you’re going to be ultimately limited by how much weight you can put on the exercise. We’re going to have to consider it just a good exercise and not the best yet, and therefore it’s going to fall into the category with the big blue circle.
And so, we talk about those lighter loads being capable of driving muscle growth. Well, there’s actually instances where the incredibly light loads can still drive growth through incredibly high volume. And that’s where Heavy Resistance Bike or Hill Riding steps in as an amazing quad builder. If you just watch the Tour de France, you’ll see that even guys are somewhat slight upper body development will have pretty massive lower bodies and quads in particular because the extremely high volumes that they get from a lot of miles racked up leads to that overall volume driving new muscle growth. Now, don’t get me wrong, if you’re just going to do a few miles at the end of your workout and not really rack up a higher total, this likely won’t do much for you.
But if you do, make sure you crank up the resistance, because with that you’re going to start to crank up the size of those thighs. And that’s why it’s going to get a blue circle in the Better Category. And so the next exercise here might startle some of you guys because given my rocky relationship with it, you might have thought that I’d belonged with one of these big red Xs through it, but it’s not the case. We’re talking about the Leg Extension. And yes, it’s in my better category.
Why? Well, by my own criteria, if you’re looking for an exercise that can create hypertrophy, specifically in the quads, and is capable of being overloaded, well, it would have to fall here. Except I still have my issues with the exercise from an overall safety standpoint. Let me explain. Though it is an exercise that doesn’t bother everybody, people that have existing knee issues are going to potentially find this exercise troublesome.
Because it places a lot of force and tension on the patella at the top of the leg extension, and anybody that has patellar tracking issues are going to feel the repercussions of that. But more so, people that have tendinitis issues in either the patellar tendon or the quadriceps tendon are going to find this exercise very aggravating because it’s very easy to exceed the capacity of the tendon in terms of the load that it can handle when there’s already a problem. Look, we’re doing the exercise to create hypertrophy, so all of us are likely putting enough weight on it to do that. However, when you realize that tendons already in duress can typically only handle about one fifth of the load that somebody would usually put on a 10 to 12 rep leg extension, you sort of see why you’re barking up the wrong tree. Now, that’s not to say that it’s not unlike the Sissy Squat that I mentioned in the begin