Leg Extension
Trains the Quads.
- Equipment
- Machine
- Mechanic
- Isolation
- Force
- Push
- Level
- Beginner
How to do it
- Sit in the machine and adjust the back pad so the backs of your knees sit at the edge of the seat, in line with the machine's pivot.
- Set the ankle pad so it rests just above your feet, on the lower shins.
- Hold the handles at the sides and sit back against the pad.
- Straighten your knees to lift the pad until your legs are extended.
- Pause briefly at the top, then lower under control until your knees are bent to around ninety degrees or a little more.
Common mistakes
- Misaligning the knee with the machine's pivot, which is the most common setup error. If the joint and the pivot do not line up, the resistance curve is wrong for the whole set.
- Swinging the weight up and dropping it. The lowering half is a large share of the available work.
- Believing that toe position isolates part of the quadriceps. All four heads share one tendon and one nerve and contract together — turning the feet in or out does not preferentially recruit the vastus medialis, whatever the machine's reputation.
- Dismissing it as pointless because it is a machine. It has one genuinely useful property: it loads the knee with the hip extended, which is the one condition under which the rectus femoris is long enough at the hip to contribute fully. A squat cannot reproduce that.