My leg training is a few days’ overdue now. As I mentioned on Sunday we went out for lunch, so that meant a postponement and yesterday I had to visit my mum’s grave as it was two years since she passed away. That left no time for a proper workout without clock-watching, so I’ll be doing that later today.
I’ve been thinking about my leg work at the gym and I’m now at the stage (which you may gather from my write-ups) where the ‘stack machines’ are too light for me, i.e. I’m pushing the maximum fixed weight on these plated machines and to get any further resistance I would need to go heavier or do a whole load more reps, which isn’t practical with strength exercises. True, I can still use the incline machine that is disc-based and can add plenty more weight, but the sled press and extension machines are now at their limit (200 and 100kgs respectively) and I’m just not gaining anything.
So with this in mind I’ve been looking back at some of my old notes from my bodybuilding days - I found a notebook from 1993 - whereby I was doing “Isolation” exercises a lot. These involve training a particular muscle group as normal but to gain definition and the ability to go heavier, you then further break it down to concentrate on the indivdual parts (i.e. sinews) that make up those muscles in question.
So for instance if we are training legs, I would be talking here about the quads, which are then further broken down into four parts:
Outer (the long sides of the thighs).
Top (the front of the thighs).
Inner (the lower muscles just above the knees).
Hamstrings (obviously the back of the upper legs).
Those are the four main areas of the upper legs (above the knees).
To these you add:
Glutes (the bum, which needs training as it supports the lower back from strain).
Hip flexors (the sides of the glutes).
Inner top (the very inside top of the thighs, near the crotch).
The remaining (8th) area of the legs is of course the calf muscles below the knees.
Are you following me so far? 
So the various exercises I do cover all of these areas withing the various apparatus, most involving more than one part at a time. But now I am going to return to some real bodybuilding on the legs (to start with then maybe some upper body work too), which will isolate each leg part separately, causing extra individual muscles to grow and be more defined. With this in mind I have drawn up a template which will need to be be spread over two days per week for the legs, starting today. I have amalgamated the tension training and my “50-reppers” routines to work together, concentrating on specific muscles on each opf these days.
I’ll explain more after my first of these workouts later on 
Just having a cuppa then I’m off up.
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