Personal Trainers Forum

[Personaltrainer]

Fitness and strength: why you need to drop exercises that aren’t specific

Building core muscles is just one area of fitness you’ll learn about in Peak Performance. One of the key messages that you’ll read regularly in our newsletter is that training methods and exercises must be specific if you are serious about improving your performance.

This is especially true for strength training. To illustrate this, we will take an example of an exercise that you’ll often see in the gym, used for strengthening the quadriceps -- the knee extension.

Many athletes use knee extensions to increase leg strength.
There is, however, a far more effective route to increased power for this and other muscles.


The best exercise for improving quadriceps is the one-legged squat. One-leg squats are performed one side at a time, in a standing position, with the ankle, knee and hip joints all working together in a similar way to running and jumping, while stability and balance is trained during the exercise.

By contrast, the knee extension involves sitting in a machine and simply contracting the quadriceps in isolation to extend the knee. The key difference between the two exercises is in functionality. The one-leg squat movement is related in function to natural athletic movements such as running and jumping, whereas the knee extension is related only to kicking in a seated position.

As a consequence, athletes who spend time on the knee-extension machine will see fewer improvements than those who spend time performing one-legged squats. It's not that knee-extension exercise will not strengthen the quadriceps; it's rather that if we focus our attention on successfully developing movements, then our time spent in the gym will have a greater positive effect when it comes to competitions.

Functionality is the basis of our approach to training and this is why athletes experience immediate results once they start following their new regime.