I recently I had the honor of co-authoring a peer-reviewed and highly-referenced paper for an NSCA journal with biomedical engineering PhD student, Andrew Vigotsky. It's titled, "Are The Seated Leg Extension, Leg Curl, And Adduction Machine Exercises Non-Functional Or Risky?"
Many trainers and coaches argue that the knee extension places tensile forces on the anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) and patellofemoral joint (PFJ). They say these exercises can be considered dangerous and instead recommend exercises like squats.
In our paper, we demonstrated how this perspective is not only shallow, but is also logically inconsistent. Here are some key points on leg extensions from our article:
With that in mind, many trainers and coaches STILL think all you need are compound movements for a complete training program, and that seated or lying exercises designed to create a resistance challenge mostly on a single-joint action, such as many machine-based exercises, don't have a positive (functional) transfer into improving sports performance or reducing injury risk.
Well, when it comes to strengthening the quads, there's a multitude of studies showing better strength gains in the quads (even among post ACL reconstruction patients) when combining open-kinetic chain exercises like leg extensions along with closed-kinetic chain exercises like squats and lunges over using only closed-kinetic chain exercises.
Not to mention, the additional benefits of using single-joint exercises along with compound exercises has been highlighted in research on soccer players from two of the best premier-league division teams in Sweden.
Researchers divided 30 players into two groups: one group received additional specific hamstring training using the lying leg curl machine, and the other group did the same strength and conditioning programs without the additional specific hamstring training using the lying leg curl machine.
Results showed that the occurrence of hamstring strain injuries were clearly lower in the group (3 out of 15) that did additional specific hamstring training using the lying leg curl machine than in the control group (10 out of 15) that did not get the additional hamstring training. Additionally, compared to the group that wasn't prescribed lying leg curls, the group that received the addition of lying curl increased sprint speed.
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