Leg press: foot placement, depth, and how it compares with the squat

The leg press is a squat pattern on a machine: you sit with your back supported and push a weighted platform away with your legs. The seat holds your torso, so there's no bar to balance and no position to hold, and you can load your legs heavily from the first week. That's why the leg day lets you pick it or the back squat as the first lift.

This page covers the setup, where to put your feet and what it changes, how deep to go, how the leg press compares with the squat, and the faults. The squat itself is on squat form.

How to set up the leg press

1. Set the backrest so that, with your feet on the platform, you can lower it until your knees are bent to at least a right angle without your hips lifting off the pad.
2. Back and hips flat on the pad, hands on the handles at your sides.
3. Feet in the middle of the platform, about hip- to shoulder-width apart, toes pointing ahead or turned out a little, the whole foot flat.
4. Press the platform up and release the lock handles. Set the stops just below your lowest position, so they'd catch the platform if a rep stalled.

The rep

1. Lower the platform under control, knees travelling in the direction your toes point.
2. Stop at your depth: as deep as you can go while your hips and lower back stay on the pad.
3. Press through your whole foot until your legs are nearly straight, without snapping your knees into a hard lock.

Most of the work lands on the front of the thigh. In trained men and women, the inclined leg press produced the highest activity in the vastus medialis, the inner quadriceps muscle, whatever the speed, stance or foot angle.¹ One muscle works relatively little: in 15 men, the rectus femoris, the quadriceps muscle that also crosses the hip, was more active in the leg extension than in the leg press, while the other quadriceps muscles weren't.²

Leg press foot placement: what it changes

Less than the advice suggests, with one exception: how high your feet sit on the platform.

• High or low. In 14 women, a high foot placement produced more glute activity than a low one, while a low placement produced more front-of-thigh activity at the heavier of two loads tested.³ In 10 experienced male lifters, a wide stance high on the platform worked the hamstrings more than a narrow one.⁴
• Wide or narrow, toes in or out. In trained men and women, neither stance width (one or one and a half times hip width) nor turning the feet out 45 degrees changed muscle activity, and the authors suggest using your preferred stance.¹ In the 10 lifters, foot angle made no difference to muscle activity either.⁴

All of this is muscle activity during a set, measured in small groups, not growth over months. Pick a placement where your heels stay down and you reach your depth, and keep it from week to week so the numbers you write down compare.

How deep to go

For the squat, deeper has the better evidence (squat form covers it). The leg press may be more forgiving. In an eight-week trial, 23 resistance-trained people with about seven years of lifting did one-leg leg presses to failure twice a week, one leg to about 100 degrees of knee bend and the other as deep as it could go, about 154 degrees. Front-of-thigh muscle thickness grew similarly in both legs.⁵

That's one short trial in experienced lifters, and it measured only the front of the thigh. A practical rule: go at least to a right angle at the knee, deeper if your hips stay on the seat, and keep the same depth every rep. The trial's shorter range still went a little past a right angle; it isn't a case for quarter reps.

Leg press for glutes

The leg press trains the glutes, but not as its main job. Feet higher on the platform raised glute activity in the 14-woman study above.³ For growth, the evidence is mixed: a 2025 review of 12 studies of glute growth found that one leg press study increased the size of the gluteus maximus and another didn't.⁶ If glutes are the goal, put your feet higher, go deep, and pair the leg press with a dedicated glute exercise such as the hip thrust.

Leg press vs squat

• Muscle growth: no clear difference between machines and free weights. A 2023 meta-analysis of 13 studies with 1,016 participants, 789 of them men, found no difference in muscle growth between free-weight and machine training in the five that measured it, and its lower-body strength comparisons were mostly the squat against the leg press, the hack squat or the Smith machine squat.⁷ The American College of Sports Medicine's 2026 position stand found strength gains didn't differ between free weights and machines, and too little data to say whether muscle growth did.⁸
• Strength follows the lift you train. In the same meta-analysis, free-weight training raised free-weight test scores more, and machine training tended to raise machine scores more.⁷
• Carry-over to jumping favored the squat. In an eight-week trial of 78 students, half of them controls, squat training raised jump heights by about 12%; the leg press group's gains, 3.5% and 0.5%, weren't significant.⁹ In the 10-lifter study, the squat also produced more front- and back-of-thigh activity than the leg press.⁴

So for building the legs, pick the one you can load well and train hard; for squatting or jumping better, squat. You can also use both: the squat first, then the leg press for more leg work without another heavy bar. New to lifting? This site's beginner plans start with the leg press or the goblet squat.

Sets and reps

• As the first lift: three sets of 6 to 10, as on the gym leg day, with two or three reps in reserve.
• After a squat: two or three sets of 10 to 15, closer to failure. (How to judge reps left.)
• Pick the weight by reps, not by a percentage of your max. How much weight to lift covers why, with the leg press as one of its examples.

The 2026 stand found muscle growth was enhanced by ten or more sets per muscle group a week,⁸ so count leg press sets toward the front of the thigh along with your squats and lunges.

Common mistakes

• Hips lifting off the seat at the bottom. The depth has outrun your setup. Stop just above that point.
• Quarter reps with a full stack. Lots of plates, little range. Take weight off until you reach a right angle at the knee.
• Heels lifting. Move your feet higher on the platform until your whole foot stays flat.
• Knees caving in. Keep them travelling in line with your toes.
• Bouncing at the bottom. Lower under control and press from a steady bottom position.
• Pressing through pain. Sharp pain is not soreness. Stop, and see a doctor or a physical therapist.

If you'd rather not plan it alone

The leg press is easy to learn; deciding whether it replaces your squat or follows it, and how many leg sets your week already has, is the part a page can't do. Coaching is the version where your workouts are built around the days you actually have, and a weekly call looks at the week you just had and rebuilds the next one. Coaching to build muscle explains how that works, and here's how to apply. Otherwise: set the seat, put your feet in the middle of the platform, and do three sets of 10 to a right angle or deeper.