Thigh Specialization

Many years ago your average bodybuilder trained his legs with a few sets of heavy squats, leg curls, and donkey calf raises, and that was it. No thigh extensions, leg presses, or fancy hack squat machines because, down in their dungeon gyms, they didn’t have any.

- Chris Lund

These new inventions, whether they were better or not, would be exclusively available for the next generation of bodybuilding hopefuls.

But, let’s be honest here, the squat is still the undisputed king of thigh massiveness and strength, which no other leg exercise can match, no matter what your current gym has. Even Arthur Jones, the creator of the Nautilus, had extreme difficulty building a machine whose results were better than the squat.

This is what Dr. Ellington Darden, PhD, who worked directly with Arthur at the Nautilus plant in Deland, Florida, told me recently: “Arthur struggled for more than 10 years until he finally came up with a leg machine that he considered better than the regular squat. The secret, according to Arthur, was the invention of the negative cam, which he invented back in 1982.”

In 1982, I flew to California to visit Vince Gironda, the master trainer behind many great bodybuilding stars of the 1960s, and I can tell you from personal experience that he had a passionate detestation of regular squats. In fact, Vince wouldn’t even allow squat racks in his gym, and if you even mentioned that dreaded word, you would set him off into a verbal rage, bordering on uncontrollable anger! “Squats build wide hips. Anyone seen doing them will be kicked out of the gym!” the Iron Guru would often declare.

The funny thing was, Vince had the widest pair of hips I’ve ever seen, courtesy of Mother Nature, and one day I actually heard him remark behind my back. “Lund has no goddamn hips!” Which is hilariously ironic because, for 20 years before I met him, I had done heavy regular squats religiously at least three times a week.