By Leo Usselman
Tom Platz is a golden era bodybuilder who competed mainly in the 1980s. He is very technical in squatting and has adopted an olympic-style lifting technique. Platz’s Leg day is popularized on the internet for being around a whopping forty sets.
This technique puts stress on the quadriceps, rather than the glutes and lower back. Olympic-style squatting focuses on the knees going forward much more, in front of the feet. In addition to this, they squat very deep.
Tom Platz in his early high school years was made fun of for being upper-body dominant and having tiny legs. He rarely squatted until he graduated. This is because he was born with a lower back issue, where it did not fuse together properly causing him a lot of pain when squatting.
When Platz graduated, he went to a gym in Detroit, with some of the greatest powerlifters, and that is when he adopted the squat and built his massive legs. They saw his potential and put him on a program, and he got strong fast. He squatted twice a week, one session heavy, and one session light.
The powerlifters were very impressed with his ability to pump out so many reps with heavier weight, and they knew his potential, so this is when they made him focus mainly on that. For the non-heavy days, he would do two sets of reps, basically doing fifteen to twenty reps to failure. On the heavy days, he would do three to five to as high as eight reps.
This is the squatting program he adopted for about five years, and it did build him massive legs, winning him Mr. Michigun.
His physique at this point was good, but not amazing. He had potential still left in the tank, both in the upper body and lower body.
Tom Platz was very inspired by bodybuilders like Arnold Schwarzenegger, and even saw him in an interview in his younger days and told him he would be training with him in Gold’s Gym one day. He responded by just laughing.
But sure enough, after Tom Platz’s intermediate days, he moved down to Venice Beach. This was to train with the greatest bodybuilders in Gold’s Gym. Something worth mentioning is Platz was so inspired he said he felt the energy being with some of the greatest all at once.
They would all train with such energy, and had so much mass, that he adopted it himself. At the time his heaviest weights he would squat were around five hundred pounds for a couple of reps, but soon enough, in Gold’s gym, he adopted this energy, and squatted this for fifteen reps.
When Platz first walked into Gold’s gym, the squat rack was dusty and literally never used. He practically created a squatting revolution to the golden age of bodybuilders. The reason that nobody squatted was that they believed it would only build your glutes and make your waist wider. But this was far from the truth, and Platz showed it.
Now that he was in Gold’s gym, he trained his legs intensely. He would go by intuition, but the immense amount of passion involved in his training was actually the key to his success. He views this squat rack as like an altar, and it was life and death in his eyes.
The interesting thing is, modern day bodybuilders say you need to squat two to three times a week to build mass on your legs, but Platz in his prime would squat only twice a month.
In his best, he would do two sets of squats every two weeks, squatting on the first and third week of each month. This is unbelievable, and unheard of, begging the question, how did he do this?
Well, the secret was in the sheer amount of intensity he put into his sessions. Platz claims that his central nervous system adapted to this crazy training style over the years, further building his ability to push himself.
He trained explosively, with so much passion in each rep, and would squat until his legs put every bit of possible energy they could into the movement. But something else happened when Platz started working out at Gold’s gym.
He met a man named Farrell, (he didn’t know his last name) but something was different about him, he wasn’t the biggest there, but he had amazing quad shaping. Platz quickly took notice of this and talked to him about it. He was relatively lean build, but his secret to the amazing separation and shaping to his quads were hack squats. And when Farrel performed hack squats, he would squat like a duck: feet together facing apart. His theory is this would predominantly target the vastus lateralis, the outer quad, separating it.
And the truth is, it worked wonders for Platz. He would do this after every squatting session. Now for the weight Platz would lift in Gold’s gym varied, but one of his most impressive feats is squatting 495 for 30 reps. He would also go on to squat 525 for 23 reps, and he also squatted 625 for 15 reps in his peak before the 1986 Mr. Olympia.
Tom Platz has the most well developed legs in the history of bodybuilding, and some of the strongest squats, and the best way to achieve goals like this is through sheer will. Certain things have happened to Platz in his life like a dramatic breakup and being bullied in his earlier years. This combined with the love for the movement, amazing genetics, and amazing pain tolerance is what created him.
Tom Platz would get so enveloped in the movement, his training partner would tell him how he was bleeding underneath the bar because it was so heavy. His shirt was soaked in blood, and it would leave a huge scab on his back afterwards just because of the weight. Not only that, blood came out of his face, from the sheer pressure. But this didn’t stop Platz because he would keep squatting even after blood came out of every direction.
And then he would do even more sets after that. He has reported times where he came close to death even. Platz claims if he leaves the gym on feeling alive, he would be extremely mad and disappointed.
There are videos of him doing leg extensions, and there is a big myth that people think that he does leg extensions predominantly. This couldn’t be further from the truth, and he only claims that his legs were built from squats and hack squats. He did leg extensions only before competitions (like Mr. Olympia). Before Mr. Olympia, he would in a sense, fine tune the legs. This was done through leg extensions, where he performed ten, twenty, thirty sets of them and followed them up maybe by hack squats.
The biggest myth to be covered by this article is that his leg day is nearly forty sets (16 of which being squat), but the truth is he did only two sets of squats to absolute failure. That’s it, and after ten years of training like this, he retired after 1986. Mr. Olympia reported it as the best he’s ever felt in his life, and he felt like “nobody on the earth.”
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