Hey guys, I’ve been training for a few years now. Lately I have been focusing on power so my lifts look something like this
Bench 4x3
Squat 4x4
etc…
I focus on the big compound lifts and I am going more for power and athletcism then anything else. My problem is that my legs are just so damn skinny. Right now I work with 225-245 on the rack. I have osgood schlaters disease (painful knee injury) but I still bust my ass every week on the squat rack going below parallel trying to increase my squat. The thing I hate is that is my chest always responds when I focus on it and I can usually always get my bench up…but I don’t care about my upper body anymore. It’s strong enough. I want to get a powerful lower body. Should I start training for hypertrophy for my lower body so that I have more muscle fibers to work with? I don’t know what to do and I am so frustrated. Thankyou for your time
I have the same problem, my upperbody responds with the quickness and my lower body doesn’t at the same rate. As of last September my bench was 330 and my squat was 350. I focused on squats for months and I barely got 365 and my bench was on a maintenance program but suffered and fell to about 300. For months after that I still concentrated on legs squating 2-3 times a week but I wasn’t progressing. I was using a low rep heavy weight program with both front and back squats.
2 months ago I decided to change my squat rep range. I dropped the weight drastically and upped the reps to 8-10 from 1-4.
What I was doing was something like this.
1358
2256
2754
3152
340-350*1 sometimes fail.
I changed it to this.
1358
1858
2058
2258
each week I added 10 lbs to my last set and 5 lbs to my 2nd to last set(until it hit 225). By the 6th week I was squatting
1358
1858
2258
2758
the 8th week
1358
1858
2258
2958
The week after that I worked up to a max and hit 385. During this program I did back squats (mentioned above), front and oh squats once per week.
Then I took 2 full weeks off and I have just started a new program.
My body was so used to low rep squatting and I changed it up to a higher rep range and my legs really responded. Change is what I needed and maybe a change is what you needed.
Maybe try changing things up and let up a little on the upper body stuff. I wish your leg strength the best.