How to do the leg press correctly

One of the more ridiculous sights at a gym is when one or more people perch themselves along with the weights of a leg-press machine and make one of their gym buddies attempt a few ultra-heavy reps. “This creates extra strain on your quadriceps muscles and puts the anterior cruciate ligament at the front of your knee in what we might call a biomechanically untenable position,” states a voltathletics.com article titled Bulletproof Your Squat by Eliminating These 5 Errors. Don’t let your glutes lift off: While the upper back or the thoracic spine is well supported on the machine, the lower back or the lumbar is still exposed to the dangers of lifting off the machine along with the glutes if you let the sled drop too low. Your back should be absolutely straight while doing leg presses to avoid any injury to your back, therefore, always grab those handles while you do a leg press,” writes therapeutic exercise specialist Anuj Tyagi in a Mensxp article on how you can make your leg press better. The leg press is not a substitute for squats: A study published in 2016 in the US National Library of Medicine, on the effects of free-weight and machine-based training, delivers a sound reminder of why the leg-press should not be used in place of squats, but rather, in tandem: “In the comparison of the squat and leg press exercise, both exercises train nearly the same muscles of the lower extremities, but in some aspects they are different: the leg-press has less requirements concerning balancing the weight and therefore, less muscle activity contributes toward stabilization compared to the squat,” it states.