Leg presses
Leg presses are MADE for cheating. Everybody with low self-esteem loves this exercise, as you can load on plenty more plates than you can actually handle, and get away with it. Well, almost. You won't get much effect on your quads, and sure, you're executing the ultimate lower-back-killer, but then again, you have a chance of catching someone's eye as you load on all those 45'ers and 100's! And isn't THAT way cool?
To get the right view of your anatomy as you work out here, draw a simple sketch of a little man doing a leg-press. You know, the force and the action happening in the hips and knee-areas, while bracing your back against the pad. Then erase the leg-press machine so that you only have the outlines of the little man left. Now the magic: Turn the paper so that the feet are pointing DOWN, as they would to a floor, instead of up. What you end up with, should be something close to a man in the middle of doing a Deadlift. Instead of holding a bar in his hands, the weight is resting against his back (as you're bracing yourself against the pad while doing leg presses). Apart from that, having a weight pressing you down against the pad is the exact same thing as if you had been standing on the floor with a pad with weights sitting on your back! This is very important to grasp: Your body couldn't care less - If you'd be standing on the floor pressing something UP, or having something fixed against your back and pressing something DOWN. ...And as we concluded when doing the sketch, the latter is exactly what you do when you're performing leg-presses, only that you turned the whole body to assume the correct position.
Now... When you try to do way too heavy leg-presses, you do two things:
1. You bend your knees too little.
2. You lift your butt off the pad.
The first point effectively kills most of the gains from this exercise. Bad start.
