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Chris Bumstead has a special strategy for his leg routines, especially during the offseason. He trains his legs twice a week, and in one of the sessions, he focuses primarily on his quads.
The reigning Classic Physique Olympia champion tries to build his legs as much as possible during the offseason to avoid them becoming skinny when they shrink during his prep.
As his calorie consumption drops massively during prep, it’s important that he builds as much mass as possible before he begins his cut.
Chris Bumstead Quad Workout
CBum ensures to warm up his knees and joints before his leg workout, as he goes quite heavy.
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He begins with a reverse StairMaster, in which he faces outwards while using the machine. Bumstead then moves on to the resistance training part of his quad workout.
Here's the break-up of his quad workout:
1) Superset: Leg Extension and Leg Curl
Chris Bumstead uses a superset of extensions and curls to warm up his hamstrings, quads, and knees.
He begins with the superset to accommodate both motions in the warm-up sets. Next, he moves to heavier sets to pump his muscles. That way, he doesn’t have to rack extremely heavy weights for the compound movements to feel the pump.
2) Smith Machine Squat
You can’t skip squats if you want to grow your quads, so CBum has squats in every leg routine. Smith machine squats can be loaded with more weight plates than conventional barbell squats.
As the barbell is fixed to a supporting structure, the balance is much easier to maintain. As such, Bumstead uses several weight plates for the exercise and cranks out heavy sets to tear his quads.
3) Leg Press
Another quad-focused compound exercise in Chris Bumstead's leg workout routine is the leg press. While he uses the exercise with both feet on the platform, there are routines where he does unilateral leg presses.
It means the bodybuilder does leg presses one leg at a time. That allows him to fix any strength or muscle imbalance between his quads. Moreover, CBum believes it’s easier to take a lower weight than having to rack and unrack ten or more plates.
Even though he can’t go as heavy with single leg leg presses as opposed to double leg ones, the weight he uses is considerably heavy enough to pump his quads massively. In fact, to get the pump, he does the exercise slowly. Additionally, it’s a good exercise to burn the quad muscles and push them to failure.
He follows a routine of a first set that ends two reps before failure; the second rest is a rest-pause with 11-12 reps followed by ten seconds of rest and 5-6 reps.
4) Leg Extension
He ends the routine with a triple drop set of two sets. Even though his leg routine is quad focused, the bodybuilder does not ignore his hamstrings and calves. Therefore, he finishes his leg routine with a few sets of hamstring curls and calves.
As a bodybuilder, Bumstead needs to work heavy sets for his muscles. Hence, his workouts do not have several exercises at the same time but a few he does with heavy weights and several sets.
What’s next for Chris Bumstead?
Chris Bumstead is the reigning Mr. Olympia, having secured the title three times in a row. He will attempt to secure the title for a fourth time, but this time the competition he’s going to face would be tough. The Mr. Olympia is scheduled for December 15-18 in Las Vegas, Nevada.
