Massive Quads with Jay Cutler
When the Night of Champions winner Jay “Big Beef” Cutler hits the leg room, it’s lights out. His approach is basic brutal big weight. “You have to do the hard work to get hard size,” says Jay. Here’s his take on 4 basic leg exercises, each of which resides in his master plan. “I go for the big burn on these,” says Jay. “If I can walk away after finishing, I haven’t done enough.”
Squats
“Squats are always first in my leg routine,” says Cutler. “It remains the classic mass builder, so you want all your strength able to come fresh into the movement, because you want the most results out of it. It’s also the hardest exercise for the legs; you have to combine a full range of leg strength with balance.” Jay doesn’t add any special twists to the squat: “It works perfectly for me as it is.” But his approach to sets is interesting: After 2-3 warm-up sets to get used to the full range of motion and to orient balance, Cutler will do another 2-3 sets at a full working weight that sees him get 8-12 reps—whatever it takes to get to muscular failure—from each set. Sort of. Jay doesn’t do a true drop set of equal or near-equal reps with lower weight, but he’ll re-rack the bar, pause 5 seconds, and do as many more reps as he can. It’s usually 1-3.