Leg Press Exercise: Muscle worked, Health Benefits, How to Do?

Leg press exercise is a great exercise to strengthen your knee muscles mainly Quadriceps, Hamstring, and calf muscles, and improve your fitness level and stamina of your legs.

What is a Leg Press Exercise?

This is one type of resistance training exercise, that is an excellent way to strengthen your leg muscles. It is done by pushing your legs against weights on a leg press machine. Like all strength training exercises, leg presses strengthen your muscle, decrease the risk of injury, and help with age-related muscle loss.

The leg press is a popular gym machine that can help to build key muscles of the legs. Leg press machine has two different types, the standard horizontal leg press, and the 45-degree leg press. Both machines are used to strengthen the hamstring and quadriceps and other leg muscles.

Which muscle is used to perform leg press exercise?

Primary muscle work:
Quadriceps muscles (vastus lateralis,vastus medialis,vastus intermedialis, rectus femoris)

Secondary muscle work:
Hamstrings (semitendinosus, semimembranosus, and biceps femoris )
Calves (Gastrocnemius, soleus )

Health benefits by doing the leg press.

• Helps to strengthen the muscles of the lower limb.
• Helps to decrease problems related to aging like muscle mass loss.
• Helps to improve running capacity.
• It Isolates the Legs
• This exercise Does not Require a Balance
• This exercise Strengthens Your Squat muscles
• This exercise Improves Your Deadlift
• You Can Move a Lot of Weight
• This exercise Improve Your Quality of Life
• It is a Friendly exercise for Beginners.

How to do leg press in perfect form?

• For this exercise, you have to choose a comfortable weight and set a seat in the machine so your knees are just flexed to get the right angle.
• Place your feet about shoulder feet width apart.
• Push through your heels, your knees lined up on the toes.
• Straighten your legs until it would be fully extended, you should avoid locking the knees.
• Now lower the weight smoothly back towards the initial position you have to complete the desired number of repetitions.

There have different variations of leg press exercises.

Standard Leg Press Stance

How to do it?

• This is A great variation to start your experience with a leg press machine is to place the standard foot placement.
• Put your legs hip-width apart on the floor. This standard leg press stance emphasizes overall leg movement and will use your glutes, hamstrings, and quadriceps.

Wide Stance Leg Press

How to do it?

• For this variation, you have to place your feet a little wider than shoulder-width apart and move your toes outwards.
• This variation utilizes the adductor muscles of the inner thighs. this muscle helps to stabilize your hip joint and allows you to pull the legs together.

Narrow Stance Leg Press

How to do it?

• This variation of foot placement utilizes your inner and outer thigh muscles, in this way utilizing your abductor’s muscles.
• Abductor muscles help you to move the side of your leg. These muscles are essential for hip and core stability. this will help to relieve knee pain, hip pain, and back pain.
• For more utilizing these muscles, you have to move your foot in a narrow stance. This will require more stabilization, so you have to hold the handle while leg pressing.

High Stance Leg Press

How to do it?

• The high stance leg press will more emphasis on the hamstrings and glute muscles.
• High foot placement allows you to contract hamstring and glute muscles during every repetition.

Low Stance Foot Placement

How to do it?

• Low stance foot placement more focuses on your quadriceps muscles.
• This position is a great substitute for squatting. In this, you have to place your leg higher machine platform and slowly lower the feet towards the platform by leg press.
• This variation helps to increase the range of motion of the knee joint, if you are suffering from knee pain you may avoid this.

Calf Work Variation

How to do it?

• For this variation, you have to place your foot to the very bottom of the machine platform.
• The ball f feet should be on the platform but your heels should be hung off on the platform. straighten your legs most of the way but keep slightly bending your knees so they do not lock. engage your core muscles to put more pressure on the platform up.
• This is a very simple exercise but after completion of some repetitions, you feel some burn in your calf muscles. you should use lightweight for this variation since your calves are not strong as your hamstrings and quadriceps.
• If you more focus on inner calves then turn your toes outwards and if you want to focus on outer calves then turn your toes inwards.

Single-Leg Stance

How to do it?

• Most everyone has a dominant and non-dominant leg.
• In these exercises you have to use both legs, the dominant leg may compensate for the non dominant leg.
• The prolonged time you continuously do this, this imbalance can increase the risk of injury or slow down your overall strength.
• To decrease, this imbalance goes for this variation using a leg press machine, beginning with low weight and standard feet placement.
• Do this exercise with the same weight on both legs.
• You will notice that your one leg is stronger than another one.do this exercise on your non-dominant leg to get equal strength.

This Common Mistake happens while performing leg press exercises. you should avoid these mistakes to get more benefits from the exercise.

This is more important that you will perform this exercise in proper form to get the most benefits.

Too Much Weight

You were not trying to lift too much weight than you should. If you can not control the moves, then you will need to decrease the weight. proper technique is more important One of the biggest factors in ensuring that you are not trying to lift too much weight than you should. If you can not control the movements, you will need to decrease the weights. Proper technique is more important than the amount of weight you are lifting. Never go fast to complete the exercise you should be done the exercise with control movement.

Buttocks Not Flat Against Seat

During exercise, your knees and buttocks are in a comfortable position, if your buttocks are raised off then adjust the seat.

Placing Hands on Knees

Do not place your hands on the knee, This will break your form. Grip the handle for assistance.

Short Range of Motion

Your hip should be not lifted throughout the movement. If you notice the hip is lifted then adjust the seat and decrease the weight.

Raising Head

Your head should be rested against the seat back. If your head is jerked then it will go forward side and you are using more weight.

Breathing

During any exercise, you should avoid holding your breath. When you focus on breathing patterns automatically it becomes normal.

Safety and Precautions

You should avoid this exercise if your pelvic floor muscles are weak as it put a lot of stress on the pelvic floor. Instead of this your therapist advised you on another leg strengthening exercise. You will not use this machine if you have a knee injury.

When did you not do this exercise?

• If your physician advised you to take a rest.
• If you feel any pain during these movements.
• If your leg or arm bones are fractured.
• If you have a back, knee, or hip injury then you should avoid this exercise.
• If your pelvic floor muscles are weak.