“Foot position, toe position and the position of your feet on machine carts can influence the emphasis of an exercise.” A standard exercise, such as the leg press, can be made more quad-centric by placing your feet lower on the footplate, while a leg extension performed with your toes turned slightly inward will hit the vastus lateralis harder than a standard extension. “There are techniques and tweaks you can apply to traditional exercises to make them more sweep-centric,” says Dave Quevedo, a certified personal trainer in Hoboken, New Jersey. Though your four quadriceps muscles always work together - that is, you can’t work the vastus lateralis or the rectus femoris without also engaging the others – there are ways to make one work harder than the rest, allowing you to specifically shape your legs the way you want them. When developed well, this muscle sweeps outwards and then downward, creating a rounded shape rather than a strictly vertical one, and giving the legs a fuller, more muscular appearance. But with a little elbow grease, some training tricks and a dash of intensity, anyone - regardless of the hereditary hand they’ve been dealt - can develop that elusive quad sweep.įor those who don’t know, a quad sweep isn’t a fabulous new way to clean your floors it refers to the shape of the quadriceps muscles, specifically the outermost of the four, the vastus lateralis. Many of us have to work hard to create shape and definition in our quads, thanks to an unfortunate DNA set that doesn’t jive with our version of perfection.

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Best exercises for quad sweep