In this post I´m going to explain how the leg press can be used to incrementally load a new trainee to develop the leg strength needed to squat.

A leg press machine is one of the most constant features of commercial gyms all over the world. Everybody’s got a leg press machine because it allows big strong guys to move hundreds and hundreds of pounds over a short range motion, and accomplish very little in terms of accumulating leg strength. Starting Strength coaches don’t use it for that. The leg press machine at Wichita Falls Athletic Club is used for a very specific purpose. It is used for a detrained population that comes into the gym with insufficient strength to do an actual bodyweight squat. If you can’t do a bodyweight squat, we’ve got to have a way to get you to where you can. They’ve used various approaches to this before: partial squats and continually add to the range of motion at the bottom. But the most foolproof way that they have found to do this is with the use of a leg press machine.

In a 45º leg press machine you sit with your butt on the leather pad and lay back against the pad. Feet go on the plate and then you push the plate up. It gives you about 4 inches of clearance between the sled and the racking device that’s being used. Then the rack are thrown to the side freeing the sled up to slide up and down the rails of the 45° frame. And then you’ll do sets of 10 reps on this.

If a detrained older woman comes in the gym who cannot squat, that is to say, who just is not strong enough to squat, what we’ll do is we’ll start her off with the empty carriage which weighs about 45lb. Then we add weight up to 65 lb, then 75 lbs and that’ll be the first day’s workout. We´re not going to try to make her sore. We´re just trying to introduce her hips and her knees to a loaded range of motion that they have not ever occupied before.

The next time she comes in we’ll add 10 lbs of that. By the time she gets the loaded sled up to about her bodyweight, then we pull her off of the leg machine and take her over to the squat rack. By then she’s strong enough to perform an actual squat with a bar on her back down to below parallel.

This works beautifully every time it’s tried. We´re not going to vouch for the usefulness of a hack squat machine or anything like this. The only experience Mark Rippetoe´s had applying this to the squat is with the 45° leg press machine and it works very well. He´s used it for decades in Wichita Falls Athletic Club to get people who were detrained to the point where they couldn’t squat to be able to squat. So if I were you, I would find somebody to either that’s got one of these machines, or find one used somewhere for with a gym that’s closing, or take the measurements of the machine out of the book “Starting Strength: Basic Barbell Training, 3rd Edition“. You´ve got this machine illustrated in this book. Have a welder make yourself up one for your gym. You’ll find it to be very useful and your members will appreciate you’re being able to get them from not being able to squat at all to been able to squat over 100 lb. It’s a life changing experience adding that much useful strength to the body. Give it a shot. This is the leg press.

Bibliographic references:

• Starting Strength. (2025). Using the Leg Press to Build Strength to Squat [Video file]. YouTube. https://youtu.be/bBriRheKJxc?si=DoDJH5tbjLuKQe1x
• Rippetoe M. (2011). Starting Strength: Basic Barbell Training, 3rd Edition. The Aasgaard Company.