Bodybuilder Nick Walker is leaving no stone unturned to secure his second Arnold Classic title. The 27-year-old bodybuilder from New Jersey has risen to prominence in the IFBB Pro League within a very short amount of time. He competes in the Men’s Open division where he secured the 2021 New York Pro and 2021 Arnold Classic titles within a year of earning the IFBB Pro card. After finishing fifth in his 2021 Mr. Olympia debut, Nick Walker took an extended break from the competition to improve his physique. He returned to the stage at the 2022 Mr. Olympia and walked away with a third-place finish and a people’s choice award. The New Jersey native dominated the stage from prejudging to the finals along with the winner Hadi Choopan and runner-up Derek Lunsford.
Walker is set to make a comeback at the 2023 Arnold Classic that will take place from Mar. 2-5 in Columbus, Ohio. His recent physique updates show phenomenal improvements, especially in the midsection. The 28-year-old opened up about his steroid cycles in recent weeks and spoke in detail about how he approaches it in the off-season as well as contest prep.
Nick Walker is a favorite heading into the 2023 Arnold Classic. However, he understands the difficulty level really well and he is keeping himself busy in the gym. Recently, the 2021 Arnold Classic winner went through a quad-focused leg workout as a part of contest prep. The video of this session was posted on his personal YouTube channel. So without further ado, let’s see how Walker annihilated the quads with different exercises.
Nick Walker goes through a quad-focused leg workout
In the beginning of the video, Nick Walker explained that he has four or five more leg days until the 2023 Arnold Classic. He understands the level of dedication he needs and stated:
“We got… Maybe like four or five more leg days to go. So gotta make every one count here. I know everyone’s training hard. So I’ve gotta make sure I’m training a lot harder than them.”
With that, Walker jumped right into the workout and started with one of the most common isolation exercises for quads.
Leg Extensions
Walker started the training session with this quad isolation movement. The 28-year-old has said in the past that he is not a big fan of this exercise. However, he does not deny the benefits it brings.
“It’s not something I normally do anymore. But luckily everything’s been feeling really, really good. I think leg extensions are very good to bring out the real detail in the quads,” Walker stated.
Walker did quite a few warm-up sets on this exercise to ensure his muscles and knee joints were sufficiently warmed up before getting into the heavier exercises. He followed the warm-up sets with working sets. For the final set, Walker did the failure set with the rest-pause method. After reaching failure at 15 reps, he took 15-second rests and reached failure twice. Walker wrapped up the exercise with a rest pause set of partial reps.
Atlantis Pendulum Squats
Walker next took to this ‘favorite’ quads exercise on the Atlantis machine. He aimed to go as heavy as possible while maintaining a higher rep range between 12 to 15 in each set. He performed the exercise with extremely slow movements in the negative phase to keep the muscles under tension for a longer duration to help with muscle hypertrophy. The 2021 Arnold Classic winner performed a back-off set after the working sets to focus on the movement and jumped into the next movement.
Leg Press
After using relatively heavier weights during the leg extensions and pendulum squats, Nick Walker took to the leg press to get a little more volume in. He applied the FST-7 (Fascia Strength Training) principle for doing this exercise. However, instead of doing seven sets, Walker only did five to six sets.
After getting a good look at the massive legs in the mirror, Nick Walker moved on to the next compound exercise.
Walking Barbell Lunges
Nick Walker wrapped up the quad exercises with this exercise. Although he prefers using dumbbells for doing walking lunges on most occasions, Walker resorted to the barbell in this training session. He pushed through a few sets of this compound exercise using moderate weights and worked his hamstrings with the next exercise.
Hyperextensions
Nick Walker has a separate training day dedicated to hamstrings. Therefore he performed hyperextensions as the primary hamstring exercise during this quad-focused exercise. After cranking out a few sets, Walker took to the final movement of the training session.
Cable Kickbacks
The Mutant wrapped up the training session with a few sets of cable kickbacks to stimulate the glutes and hamstrings and called it a day in the gym.
Overall, the workout included:
Quads
Hamstrings
The 2023 Arnold Classic roster has a deep pool of talent. Famed bodybuilding coach Chris Aceto recently opined that Walker will look better than he looked at the 2022 Olympia and it will be difficult to beat him at the 2023 Arnold Classic. However, he has to fend off fierce competition to win his second Arnold Classic title. Although The Mutant faces a monumental challenge from the elite bodybuilders, he definitely has the potential to beat everyone and emerge victoriously as long as he maintains the focus and intensity.
You can watch the full leg workout video here, courtesy of Nick Walker’s personal YouTube channel:
Catch full coverage of the 2023 Arnold Classic, including pre-judging, event recaps, analysis, and final and full results at our Arnold Classic coverage hub: FitnessVolt.com/arnold-classic
Published: 15 February, 2023 | 9:08 AM EDT
You can also follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and
YouTube for even more content.
