Strange Build

[Garland]

Okay, I'm not bragging...I hope to post some pictures, or better yet, a video clip to corroborate this claim...but...I can press alot of weight with my lower legs. This means, seated horizontal (semi-horizontal at least) leg press, normal leg press, thigh abduction, and thigh adduction machines...so much so that I max out all of the machines at my gym for lower body. After doing some upperbody work, and finding almost the EXACT opposite (like patheticly low upperbody strength )...I asked the people working at the gym to come look to see if I was doing something wrong...they saw where I was and said that all of the lifts were done correctly, I did them slow and fast at the maxxed out weight with very little resistance, for what I believe to be way too many reps for somebody my size...maybe I'm wrong...I don't know...but...why isn't my upper body even close...I'm struggling putting up the plates toward the middle for all the upperbody exercises, and I know 60lb dumbbells are about the top area of what I can bench with freeweights right now.

What the hell is wrong with me?...am I part frog or something? (no need for french jokes, I'm greek and german...on second thought, no greek or german jokes either.)

[jubaji]

Hmmmmm.....you are a Soviet-era woman.

Sorry

[Garland]

that might explain my hairy legs and chest as well...hmmmmm...




actually, when I do the leg presses, my calves look kinda fucked up. I'm a shitty runner...and there's almost no reason why I should be putting up this much weight...I've always put up on leg presses, but this is the first chance

I've can now isolate the other areas of the leg as well including the adduction, abduction, different leg press machines (which I also use to work my calves by locking out my legs and tapping the machine back with just the ball of my foot), and lateral leg raises...and the results are the same, maxed out machines or a buttload of plate weight (plus maybe a friend sitting on the machine), alot of reps...not too much effort.

Oddly enough...seated hamstring curls are about the only leg based lifts I've found I do relatively poorly with, only being able to rep up (I go 12 times, 3 sets) about 210 lbs...which I'm trying to remedy. (my goal is a 5 lb in this lift every time I visit the gym, or two more sets of twelve on the my current max rep weight.)

[EmptyneSs]

the lowerbody is usually stronger than the upperbody isnt it?

[Garland]

the lowerbody is usually stronger than the upperbody isnt it?

yeah...but I'm a complete weakling when it comes to any upperbody exercise...and I haven't seen anybody at my gym try to do the leg exercises with the weight I'm putting up, and they look at me like I'm fucking crazy. The ratio's out of whack, instead of 1:2 it's like 1:8.

[SuicideGrip]

What is your whole routine? Diet? Supplement? Sleep schedule? Are you going to failure on each set? Whats your warm up look like? Include reps, sets, % of max lift used, max lift on each excercise (if available), and any other big things (supersets, trisets, super slow lifts, negatives). Your problem is probably in there.

[Nips]

I've found a similar thing. I've only recently started martial arts, but I was goin to the gym well before that, and the exact same thing was happening with me. I'm not particularally strong, and I was doing nearly nill excersise beforehand, and I was doing 140kg on the leg press my first day at the gym, after a year of being a lazy sh*t. Then I went over to the bench press, and was struggling with 30-40kg. That's a rather big contrast. I've got massive thighs and it kind of runs in my family, so I wasn't really concerned, and I'm just working on building upper body strength now.

[Britt]

I'm kind of the same way, Garland. My upper body strength is fairly run of the mill; respectable, but not going to win me any powerlifting competitions anytime soon. My lower body strength is much, much greater; I can usually press the stack on a machine. I think it's partly because I have really long legs and partly because I've been a long distance runner all my life.

In high school it was comical, because I ran cross country track and was skinny as a rail, like 6'2" and 127 lbs. My upper body strength was near nonexistant and my arms were like twigs, but I could leg press as much as anybody in the school, football team included. I'm a little better proportioned now, but my lower body strength is still a lot greater than my upper body.