In a sea of information about fitness equipment and exercises, finding correct information can be surprisingly difficult. This confusion involves even the most beloved and oft-studied fitness machines, to include the leg extension machine.
Looking a bit more closely, if you’re trying to understand leg extension benefits, you’ll usually get a pretty incomplete picture of all that the machine/exercise has to offer. This is mainly because most leg extension machines only allow you to target your quadriceps muscles. That’s great if you want to build big thighs. But what about combining a leg extension machine with a leg curl machine?
Our PLC01 leg extension machine has done just that, allowing you to derive the benefits from both machines and exercises. But before we delve further into some of its main features, let’s look at why this machine should have a place in your home gym, and what the main leg extension benefits are.
Leg extension benefits
Apart from building big quads, just what are the primary leg extension machine benefits? Let’s examine a few:
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Easily Adjustable resistance
- The leg extension machine allows you to set the weight to fit your unique strength profile. This can be especially useful to newer lifters who haven’t quite mastered the compound barbell lifts and don’t want to spend half of the session adjusting the weight.
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Accessory exercise
- Maybe you’re on the other end of the strength spectrum and you’ve mastered the barbell back squat. Maybe you’ve hit a plateau and need to introduce some variation exercise to help you break through. Working 3-to-5 sets of heavy leg extension into your regimen twice a week could be enough to break the deadlock.
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Strengthen your knee joint
- Help bulletproof your knees by increasing the strength in your upper quads in the safe and controlled manner that the leg extension machine allows for.
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Unilateral training option
- Most of us experience weakness in one leg more so than the other. The leg extension benefits you by allowing for single-leg training and building strength in the weaker leg.
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Improving overall balance
- Improving your leg strength is a great way of improving your dynamic balance (Cinarli, et al., 2022). Even just adding the leg extension as an accessory movement will help to provide a broader range of leg strength, thereby improving your performance in other exercises and sports.
How to get the most out of your leg extension session
When it comes to ease of use, the leg extension machine is one of the simpler-to-use fitness machines out there. Add this to the growing list of leg extension benefits! Taking a few seconds to ensure that the machine is properly configured to your unique body proportions and that the weight/resistance is appropriately set goes a long way in ensuing that you have a fruitful session.
Adjust the backrest so that you can sit comfortably and that allows you to easily grip the handles at the side. Make sure your knee is in line with the pivot point of the leg extension machine and the pad is resting on your shins, just above your ankle.
Take a deep breath and extend your legs by contracting your quads. Exhale in a controlled manner as you perform each repetition. Pause briefly at the point of full extension, and inhale as you slowly lower the weight back to the starting position.
The leg extension benefits you derive will differ based on what your specific goals are. These goals will also influence your loads and rep schemes. For beginners, lower weights and rep counts are ideal for learning the movement.
For more experienced lifters who are mainly interested in growing the size of their quads, bigger sets (15-30 reps) with moderate resistance is best for hypertrophy. If strength is the main objective, smaller sets (3-8 reps) at higher levels of resistance is the way to go.
Overall, there are a number of different approaches to leg extension machine training, although the more specific leg extension benefits your experience will be heavily influenced by your training goals as well as the number of sets, rep counts, and resistance you use during your sessions.
Leg curl benefits
Earlier, we mentioned the PLC01 leg extension, leg curl machine. We want to briefly discuss some of the leg curl machine benefits that complement the leg extension benefits discussed above.
Some leg curl machine benefits include:
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Strengthen the hamstrings
- Hamstring muscle strains are some of the most frequent injuries in sports (Wang, Lu, 2012). The leg curl machine directly targets these muscles, strengthening them and helping to prevent these types of injuries.
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Reduced lower back strain
- Strengthening the hamstrings helps reduce lower back strain, spreading the overall load across the back of the legs, rather than overloading the lower back muscles. Weak hamstrings are a common cause of lower back issues.
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A safer way to load the hamstrings
- Because of the support the leg curl machine provides, you can reduce the risk of injury while performing a different hamstring exercise involving free weights.
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The ability to isolate the hamstring muscles
- The leg curl machine allows you to isolate the hamstrings in a safe and controlled manner. Also, because you can increase the weight in increments, you can gradually work to overload the muscles, resulting in greater strength gains over time.
What’s next?
We hope that you now have a better understanding of the types of leg extension benefits you can derive from working a dedicated leg extension machine into your training. Our short discussion about the benefits of leg curl machines should also get your juices flowing in regard to how one of these machines can greatly complement your overall lower-body training regimen.
It only makes sense to “kill two birds with one stone, then…right?”
If you agree, make sure to check out our PLC01 Leg Extension Curl Machine which combines all of the benefits of leg extension and leg curl machines into one convenient piece of equipment. If you’re going to go out of your way to maximize leg extension benefits, you may as well go all the way and maximize leg extension and leg curl benefits!
References
Cinarli, F., Adanur, O., Esen, O., Barasinska, M., Cepicka, L., Gabrys, T., Karayigit, R. (2022).
Relationship between Unilateral Leg Extension Strength and Dynamic Balance in Healthy Young Men. Applied Science, 12.
Wang, G., & Lu, A. (2012). A Strength Training Machine Specific for Hamstrings: Injury Prevention
and Rehabilitation. Applied Mechanics and Materials, 195.
