good morning everybody i'm john's friend brett and i'm joined here with john's good friend daryl mayo and uh today we're here to celebrate um we're actually celebrating uh the birth of john meadows it is john's birthday today and so what better way to celebrate uh other than we're going to come to the gym we're going to train train legs and uh bring you guys along for the ride you need to show them this too just so they know what's going down it's like that so daryl how long have you known john so john's actually been in my life since the day i was born uh so actually i've called him uncle john about my whole life uh he actually funny story so i got to go to the 2016 arnold classic and watch him compete and i just remember walking out and i was talking my dad we were walking down the alley belt back to our truck and i was like dad this is what i want to do and he's like okay and you know he's just kind of like whatever man if that's what you want to do but you know john was always supportive of me and wanted to help me out they actually got to coach me for mr ohio back in 2020 and we won both classes it was awesome but yeah man he's been in my life since day one so what about you how did you start off i've known john for about 13 years now for like the last three years or so we train together every day and uh for like the i don't know nine ten years before that we were training together i don't know once a week a couple times a month and so i've definitely had my share of uh mountain dog workouts and so for today's workout i thought we would try to bring you guys something that some few things that i remember maybe from seven eight years ago where um for various reasons john just loved to train and so he would kind of had favorite techniques and so some things would kind of come and go and so some of the things i maybe remember us doing seven eight years ago i'm gonna try to incorporate in today's workout so hopefully you guys can take away and maybe say hey i'm gonna try this technique the next time i do legs the only real way to do that is by light curls so thinking back of training with john you know lifetime fitness back in the day there was never a question of what exercise you were starting with it was always a leg curl so it really was i'm going to start with lying leg curls see the leg curls and what kind of crazy intensifier were you going to do and so thinking back on that time i'm thinking we're going to do seated leg curls and what we have here is a hammer strength seated leg curl machine it's plate loaded if i remember correctly john specifically had a hand in obtaining this maybe ordering it i believe it came from i can't remember his name but he's the owner of mad town fitness in madison wisconsin thank you very much i can't think of your name but you sent this down for john to put in this gym so we greatly appreciate that um and another cool story about this machine is this is the exact machine that dave tate has that elite fts so you might look familiar where john used this um same machine at elite fts so we're going to get started uh first exercise of the day seated leg curls so for the technique of what we're doing we're doing sets of eight and so we're going to work up doing sets of eight until we find a hard eight and what we're doing a little different is we're doing dead stops so after every rep you're going to come to a complete stop at the top of the range of motion and then you're going to pull back down so come to a complete stop up here and then complete stop curl and so we're gonna do sets of eight working up and then we're gonna do a drop set so we're gonna do eight eight eight and then twenty partials on the top so that'll be our final working set but right now we're just working up uh warming up doing sets of eight okay so we've got up to our working weight and so we're gonna do a drop set of eight eight eight and those those three drop sets that's all dead stops you're gonna make sure you come to a complete stop at the top of that range of motion and then curl it down up complete stop um so we're gonna do eight eight eight and then we're gonna do 20 partials in those 20 partials you're not going to dead stop you're just pumping little slowly but you're pumping little partials at the top of the range of the motion so uh let's get going daryl if you're ready wait stop yeah what's that oh so after the last drop this is a little light so for the partials we're going to just add back a little more weight for them so 20 partials at the top just little it's a little slow with the top random range of motion three slow slow slow [Applause] so for this since we did leg curls and we haven't done any leg extension so our knees aren't like completely warmed up so going on the hip press or the leg press we want to make sure we take our time and make sure our knees and everything are warmed up so we're going to slowly do one play the side two play the side three play the side and like for all of those probably like 10 or 15 reps right but then once it's it should start to get heavy at like i don't know five four or five plates yeah and so then we're gonna back down on the reps because we really wanna you wanna save your energy because i've got a challenge for us that we really want to do you want to be 100 so you don't want to waste your energy doing 10 reps right before we do that so you want to save it also let's just keep slowly warm up just do as many uh reps as you need to to feel what your knees are warm up in your cage unleashing some fury so okay so for these we're doing these specifically for quads so i want your feet a little closer together than normal and low and so on this hip press about as low as you can safely go is where there's maybe an inch or so underneath his feet and when he presses it's still going to feel he's still gonna feel his full foot on the on the platform but it kind of looks like it's hanging off the edge but it shouldn't feel that way and so this should be all quad okay so we're doing this on the rogers hip press machine machine hip press machine which this was john's favorite machine it was like it's basically very similar to a leg press machine and i know most of you people um you're not going to have a hip press machine at your gym but if you have a leg press machine you can do the exact same thing we're doing here on the leg press so what we're doing is we've warmed up as i talked about with daryl earlier we warmed up we did a bunch of reps the last set of our warm-up i think i did four or five reps because we're trying to save it all the energy for this little challenge that we got here so what i'm picturing is i can remember lifetime fitness john and i on the leg press machine going back and forth and i remember like the first time he told me we were going to do this i thought he was freaking crazy because what we're going to do is we found a weight that we think will be a hard eight reps give or take and so this works best if you have one training partner um so i'll i'll go i'm gonna do eight reps then daryl's gonna go he's gonna do eight reps then we're gonna do a drop so we're gonna pull a plate each side and then i have to do more reps than the last time so usually every time yeah so so the first time you're gonna do eight you're gonna drop and then you'll probably get like 10 or 11 kind of depends then we're going to drop again then you got to get more reps than 10 or 11. so then you'll probably get like 13 14 then you're gonna drop again and then maybe you'll get like 20 or something and then you're going to drop again and then hopefully you're going to get uh 25 30. so at some point you're gonna drop enough that you've gotten like more than 30 reps on a drop set and so once you do a set where you've completed more than 30 reps then you're basically done because you're just going to be exhausted there's just no way you're going to be able to do 30 reps and then drop and then do what 50 60 70 like there's just not you're just not going to be capable of that much so um what i think might be fun because this was going to be a long drop set because we're just going back and forth dropping the weight not stopping so i think we're going to try and set a timer too so you guys can see how long it takes just daryl and i to do this because to be honest i'm not quite sure five ten minutes um so we'll see [Applause] that's cold so basically we're competing right now to see who gets a bigger number i got it yeah wait till i go wow [Applause] come on come on [Music] oh um um uh hmm [Music] oh more [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so to recap that hip press leg press challenge daryl destroyed me because i think i got 8 11 14 17 20 and maybe 25. you did what i did i did 10 15 20 26 30 and 40. yeah and so like once you once you do a set like he did like 40 like if you were to drop it and try to do another set you're going to get what are you going to get like 55 60 or something like it's almost and you're going to be so cardiovascular taxed however that word is yeah you start to get out of breath you're just going to run out of breath so one thing we're not going to tell you too is our cameraman destroyed us but we won't talk about that but to keep in mind a few things to keep in mind when you do that your your you know what your body is going to want to make it as easy as possible so if you make a huge jump from like 10 15 25 to 30 or 25 30 something like you make this big old jump make sure your your rep uh tempo is still the same you're slowing it down because your body is going to want to maybe shorten that range of motion you're going to want to do it a little faster make sure you try to keep that same technique in there so that you can kind of auto regulate your body body's going to want to make it easier so speaking of the hack squat there's nothing more john meadows-esque than a reverse banded hack squat so we've got two bands hooked up here that's kind of going to kind of take out a little bit of that tension at the bottom of the range of motion and it's going to get harder as we go through the range of motion so a little easier at the bottom and it'll get a little harder at the top so so moving on from the hip press leg press make sure you take your time because you're going to be gassed from that challenge set so we're just easing into it we're going to just do one plate right now just to kind of get the feel of that and then probably two three four like we'll probably start making some jumps but you don't wanna all of a sudden just jump right through the hack squat load up four or five flights and do your working set because you gotta recover from that that challenge that we just did so be sure that you kind of re-energize take your time to get ready because we've got another little challenge ahead of ourselves the goal here is we're going to try to find out a set that's a hard six reps so we just did you know a bazillion reps on that hit press leg press so now we're going to come over to hex squat and the goal is one hard set of six so we can get that benefit of that lower rep range set so we're on i think this is our third set here working up and i think this is going to be my working set of six reps so we'll kind of see and if it feels light there's nothing wrong with that then you just you know add a little more weight and make the next uh set your working set so just one thing to keep in mind after that challenge set over there you probably won't be able to do as much weight as you're probably accustomed to like in my head i thought we were gonna do four or five reps or four or five plates per side and it looks like three maybe a little more than three so don't be discouraged if uh your muscles are a little more fatigued i think it's the proper way of saying it than you're used to but either way as long as you're putting in the effort that's all that really matters so one quick uh thing i want to point out that john preached to me and definitely helped me is make sure the platform you want a platform that one is adjustable and so we also want to make sure with the adjustment put it about as high as it goes because then instead of the platform being like this right you're like this and it's going to be easier on your knees so if you think if if this was flatter your knees are going to track more forward and as you get into doing this you know 10 years 15 years or whatever all those those reps those are hard on your knees and those will add up and so one thing that was a major takeaway i took from john is he never had any knee problems and he always focused on making sure the platform was up oh i think that was a hard seven so that's going to be the working set okay so my take away from watching that is i'm just having flashbacks of training with john because his form just reminds me of john where it was like whether it was hack squad or squatting just like a sorry just like a piston and it was just to me it's picture perfect it's explosive it just it just reminds me of john first curse word in four years is is by just this guy on leg day so you're gonna try to do two more reps than the last time we felt that so like eight to ten then i'm going to pull 145 and then you're going to try to get 10 reps of the one and a half reps now this is something john used to love and do back in the day so you're gonna go down up like halfway down and then all the way up and that's one one and a half right so you're going to try to get eight drop ten one and a half and then after those one and a half you're going to come down and we're gonna try to do a 10 second iso hold on bottom further stretch your quads you know i think would make it a lot easier if i just started it and then he didn't tell me anything ahead of time just told me what to do maybe after that 10 seconds we'll sneak a little john meadows that's small that's fine all right let's do it ready are you ready buddy let's go come on give me one more i'll lighten the logo come on that's five all right a lighter item come on now come on come on two more little one more round now let's get down in there now hold that hold that deep stretch come on eight seven six come on five five four come come down just a little come down just a little bit right there now hold hold hold one two three just down just a little he's down six inches so let's go come on one two three four five that's good stuff right there how you feeling man i feel great speechless okay so we finished up on the hack squat and now we're gonna move on and we're gonna circle back to the hamstring so we started with the hamstring i see the leg curl and we pumped them out now we're gonna finish up today's workout with uh some rdls but the little twist is years ago john would do a lot of exercises against bands and so what we're going to do here is we're going to do a romanian deadlift but we're going to do it against some bands so i'll show you in a second here how we set that up and how that looks but we're gonna do three sets just three straight sets of eight reps uh banded romanian deadlifts to squeeze and flex and focus on the glute hamstrings all right so here's how we're going to set this up i've got a long red i forgot what they call it but it's a long red band from elite fps so you're just going to evenly lay it out just in front of the barbell here and what you're going to do is you want to stand on it right in the middle so just stand over it and then you're going to put your hands in here so just loop your hands in and now we're going to be able to do these rdls against the band so this is what it's going to look like [Applause] okay