When The Leg Press Will Increase Your Squat, And When It Won’t
Training more muscle specific exercises (ex: leg press for the quads to help improve the squat) can have crossover effects with other lifts, but the more they have in common with the lift, the more effective they will be.
Why You Can’t Combine Exercises To Get The Best Of Both
Multi-joint exercises, sometimes called “compound exercises,” are great for strength and muscle building because those exercises work many muscle areas at once. Single-joint exercises are a great way to supplement these because those target areas that don’t get targeted as much during multi-joint compound exercises. However, other “compound” exercises - which are usually just disparate exercises put together either in a circuit using the same weight or mashed into one movement - aren’t good for maximizing your effort because they are limited by the weakest area involved in the exercises. Because our lower bodies tend to be stronger than our upper bodies, we cannot progress properly if our lower body lifts (deadlift, squat, etc) are limited by how much we can lift during our upper body lifts (bench, overhead press).
What You Look Like Shouldn’t Matter
Feeling good in our bodies is often wrongly conflated with “looking good to other people.” Many people start working out because they want to change how they look, but there is a genetic limit to what we can change about our bodies. Finding something at the gym that makes it fun and rewarding to do the actual work of working out is much more rewarding and often leads to feeling good even if there aren’t big visual changes to the body.
Plateau?
It’s natural to see diminishing returns as you advance in fitness because the closer you get to your genetic limit, the harder and longer it takes to make progress. Most times when people complain about plateauing, what they’re really complaining about is not seeing the results they want fast enough. Properly managing expectations and accurately tracking your progress is key.
There Is No Goal
Often exercisers set unrealistic goals, especially in the short term, which can easily demotivate them when they’re not achieved. Sometimes it can be best to not make goals at all, focus on making consistent and steady progress by continuing to exercise.