15 Minutes to Eradicate Chicken Legs
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By John Romaniello
After Arnold's post yesterday about chicken legs, I knew that you could benefit from a workout I wrote for Men's Fitness. Here's a condensed version for schwarzenegger.com.
With only 15 minutes of time, it’s difficult to imagine that one could get a great leg workout. What about one that can increase strength, speed, power, and muscle size? Impossible? Not remotely.
Let’s check out the 15 minute leg routine.
For this workout, we’ll be employing a unique training method of pairing exercises using heavy loads with un-weighted explosive exercises. This is a contrastmethod that allows for increased fiber recruitment due to something called post activation potentiation (PAP). Potentiation is the act of making a movement more efficient by pairing it with a previous activity.
For the specific purposes of this program, this means that by alternating the heavy exercises with the explosive exercises, each time successive heavy set becomes more effective than the previous one. In just a few sets (and just 15 minutes) you can actually stimulate as many muscle fibers as you can in a traditional length leg workout.
Additionally, this technique has been useful not only for increasing strength and size, but has also been effectively used to increase sprinting speed and jump height. That is, it makes your legs more efficient at nearly everything.
The Workout
Circuit A – Perform 2 sets of squats, resting 60 seconds in between them. Immediately after your second set, perform the jump squat for 60 seconds. After your jump squats, rest 60 seconds and perform another set of squats, immediately followed by another 45 seconds of jump squats. Rest 90 seconds, and repeat this circuit. After the second circuit, proceed immediately to B.
A1) Barbell Squat – 2×5
A2) Jump Squats – as many as possible in 90 seconds. Rest 45 seconds.
A3) Barbell Squat— 1×5
A4) Jump Squats – as many as possible in 30 seconds.
Rest 90 seconds and repeat.
Circuit B – Perform 3 sets of standing barbell calf raises, resting 30 seconds in between them. Immediately after your second set, perform explosive standing calf raise as fast as you can without weight. Rest 60 seconds and another set of barbell calf raises, immediately followed by another 30 seconds of explosive calf raises. Rest 30 seconds, and perform one more set of barbell calf raises.
B1) Barbell Rocking Calf Raises – 3×6
B2) Explosive BW Calf Raises – as many as possible in 90 seconds. Rest 45 seconds.
B3) Barbell Rucking Calf Raises – 1×6
B4) Explosive BW Calf Raises – as many as possible in 30 seconds. Rest 30 seconds.
B5) Barbell Calf Raises – 1×6
There you have it – 15 Minutes to Bigger, Faster, Stronger Legs.
You can read the full article, which includes an absurd photo from the Men's Fitness shoot, here.
Join the discussion in the forum to share motivation and progress.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
John Romaniello is an angel investor, the author of two upcoming books with HarperCollins, and the founder of Roman Fitness Systems, a training and online coaching company based in NYC. Romaniello regularly works with all types of clients, from youth athletes to social media moguls.
John Romaniello website: www.RomanFitnessSystems.com
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