Can't Fail Strategies for Blasting Legs

Teenage Phenom Cody Montgomery Shows You How

Cody Montgomery is a phenomenon. He won’t be 21 until August but already he has created bodybuilding history, in being an unprecedented Three time (2012-’14) Teenage Nationals champ. He has a great future ahead of him and here we let’s us into his leg building strategies.

 A Solid Foundation for Big Wheels

 Many teens don’t put a whole lot of emphasis on training their legs, if they train them at all. I confess to having a full four years of lifting under my belt before I did my first set for legs. Not so with Cody. At 14, he was already watching YouTube every day and studying the workouts of the stars to get ideas for his own training.

 “For legs, I used to watch Ronnie and Jay’s training and take things from those,” he tells us. So even then, he was doing a fairly complete leg routine that included squats, leg presses, hacks, walking lunges and various types of leg curls all performed at his local gym, Lifetime Fitness. Cody found out early on that his legs would need special attention, since his upper body simply seemed to respond better and grow faster. But rather than let this deter him from training them hard or even giving up on them as so many young guys (and many not-so-young men) do, he continued to work them with diligence and a constantly open mind to seek out better ways to stimulate growth.

 Cody is far from being satisfied with his leg development as it stands right now, and when asked what he still wants more of, it’s pretty much everything. “Aside from getting them bigger in general, I want more outer sweep, more width from the side, more detail, just really complete legs from every angle.” With that in mind, here are the seven main exercises he uses to bring his wheels one step closer to greatness at every workout.

 1) Leg Extensions

 For most of his lifting career thus far, Cody used leg extensions primarily as a warm-up, doing three or four sets of 10-12 reps just to get a little pump going and blood flowing around his knees. Now, he uses extensions to “front load” his quads to make sure they work harder on the compound movements to follow, performing five to seven sets of 10-15 reps with 30 seconds rest between. “The 30 seconds isn’t timed, and it isn’t exact,” he points out. “I did time it for a while until I got a good sense of how long 30 seconds is, more or less.”

2) Squats

 Back when Cody was playing football toward the end of middle school and into freshman year of high school, he squatted for pure power, as football players do. That means he took a wide stance with the bar low on his back to allow the glutes, hams and lower back to contribute to the lift as much as possible. He even entered a couple of powerlifting meets around this time, but didn’t stick with it long. “I’m not really a one-rep kind of guy,” he explains. “Plus that’s when I was starting to watch the pros train on YouTube and saw they used a different style and did a lot more reps, which focused on the quads so much more.”

 He confesses that he didn’t really begin squatting like a bodybuilder, with the bar higher on his back and a closer foot stance, until about four years ago, but feels the stint of powerlifting definitely helped his squat. Montgomery is deceptively strong for his size on this exercise. Though he takes the time to warm up and gradually increase the weights over as many as six to eight sets, on good days he can knock out a set with 495 for eight deep reps. “I guess I can do a decent amount of weight,” he says modestly.

3) Leg Press

 After squats, which he considers the bread-and-butter movement for bigger thighs, Cody will move on to either the leg press or the hack squat. On these, he will do three to four sets of 10-12 constant-tension reps, never pausing at either the top or the bottom of the rep. “This approach has been described it to me as being like a piston,” says Cody. If you’ve never done your sets this way, it’s actually tougher because the muscle never gets a break. The pump and burn when you rack the weight will let you know you’re on to something very productive.

 Another thing Cody finds productive is to switch up the type of leg press he uses every so often. “You never want to keep stimulating the muscles the exact same way if you have options,” he observes. “You’ll notice that even when two leg presses might look pretty similar, they get you sore in slightly different areas— that’s muscle confusion, and it’s a great thing if you’re trying to grow.”

4) Hack Squats

 Cody actually got away from hacks for a time, but has been doing them again. “I just don’t feel it’s a natural movement the way a squat is, so going super heavy on hack squats is probably going to lead to knee trouble eventually,” he says. That’s why he prefers doing them after both extensions and squats, so he can get more out of the movement with less risk; as the weights are a bit lighter. It should be noted that the machine he is seen using here is really more a “vertical squat” machine than a hack, and he typically uses a more standard hack squat machine. “But as I was saying with the leg press, it’s important to use different machines from time to time so I do use this at times too.”

5) Lying Leg Curls

 Lying leg curls may be done twice in a leg workout, once as a warm-up after leg extensions, then later as a heavier movement. “If you think about it, squats use a lot of hams when you do deep reps, not just quads; so you should warm those up too,” he notes. Working hard on lying leg curls along with either barbell or dumbbell stiff-leg deadlifts is the foundation for his hamstring training. “Form is everything on leg curls,” he says. “You want to feel the hams contract forcefully at the top of every rep, and you want to get a full stretch at the bottom of every rep. You can’t do the reps too fast or else you won’t have quality reps, and you won’t get much from the exercise.”

6) One-leg Curls

 I’ve interviewed God knows how many bodybuilders about their leg training, and most have said the only benefit to using a single-leg curl machine in addition to the standard lying leg curl is greater isolation. “It’s like a concentration curl for the hamstring,” Montgomery said, echoing what so many of his predecessors had told me. But this 20-year-old was the first to also say that he feels they’re important for a more legitimate reason. “We all have a dominant limb, and it will always take over at least somewhat when we train both limbs at once like with a lying leg curl,” he explained. “Working one hamstring at a time, you can make sure the weaker side is getting the work it needs so it won’t fall behind any more.” That being said, he still considers lying leg curls to be the superior mass-builder for hams, with the single-leg version being more of a finishing movement.

7) Standing Calf Raises

 “Huge calves definitely do not run in my family,” Cody says. As such, he’s had to put in considerable effort to bring them up to a respectable standard of development, and he’s nowhere near being content with them. He does both standing and seated calf raises. Seated calves are done for standard heavy sets of 8-12 reps, but standing raises are more involved. He will do three sets of 20 reps, but at the end of the 20 reps he does 10 partial “burns” in the stretch position.

 “The stretch position on calf raises is so key to making them grow, but most people never even get the stretch because they either aren’t strong enough to use a full range of motion with the weights they choose, or they don’t realize they are supposed to.”

 Stretching is so fundamental to Cody for calves that he also stretches them between every set of both exercises. Considering his calves are not a genetically strong body part like his arms, he’s doing a superb job with them so far.

 What a Future! But Please, Easy on the Predictions for Now

 Cody Montgomery has already accomplished a few things no teenager ever has in this sport. No one has ever won the Teenage Nationals twice – never mind three times like he has done. With that sort of resume it’s customary to start making grandiose predictions about when he will turn pro, how good a pro he will be, and whether or not he will ever become Mr. Olympia. You know what I say, as the parent of two teenagers myself? Just give him time!

Current Training Split*

 Monday:                      Heavy legs

 Tuesday:                      Chest and calves

 Wednesday:                 Back

 Thursday:                     Legs— higher reps and more volume

 Friday:                         Shoulders and calves

 Saturday:                     Arms

 Sunday:                       Rest

 *For his 2013 Teen Nationals off-season and pre-contest training, Hany had Cody on a three-on, one-off split. This is the schedule he currently follows as a college freshman just beginning his off-season for the 2014 show.

Leg Workout

 Leg Extensions                              5-7 x 10-15 (FST-7 front-loading)

 Seated or Lying Leg Curls              3-4 x 10-12

 Squats                                          4-5 x 15-8

 Leg Press or Hack Squats              3-4 x 10-12

 Stiff-leg Deadlifts                           4 x 8-10

 Walking Lunges                             3 sets of 10-15 steps per leg

 Calf Workout

 Seated Calf Raises                        3-4 x 8-12

 Standing Calf Raises                      3 x 20 + 10 partials in stretch position

Cody Answers: Why Don’t More Teenagers Have Good Legs?

“There are a few reasons I think most teenagers don’t have good legs. For one thing, it’s not a body part many people will see. You don’t walk around in posing trunks or short shorts every day. So they focus on the muscles they can see and show off, like arms and chest. You hear the expression ‘curls for the girls,’ you don’t hear about doing squats! Leg training is tough, too. It’s not fun like bench pressing and doing curls. You will see tons of kids around the bench presses at the gym every night, not the squat rack. But I think things might be starting to change, thanks to social media. I see memes with pictures of guys with big upper bodies and skinny legs saying ‘Friends don’t let friends skip leg day’ on Facebook and Instragram. So I think there might be an awareness now that legs are something you should work. I hope so. Besides the actual development, heavy leg training just boosts your testosterone and stimulates overall gains.”

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