Men’s Open bodybuilder Nick Walker sure does train a lot. The iron paradise is a frequent habitat for “The Mutant,” and he is consistently switching up his training partners. Recently, Walker trained with 2019 212 Olympia champion Kamal Elgargni, boasting extensive leg workouts involving many weight plates. On June 20, 2022, Walker returned to the gym with another 212 Olympia competitor: Derik Oslan.
This is the first time Walker and Oslan have ever trained together, and as is par for the course for Walker, the duo tackled a leg day.
This is where we separate the men from the boys; the sheep from the lions.
Check out their full lower body workout in the video below, courtesy of Walker’s YouTube channel:
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The session opened with seated hamstring curls. Oslan and Walker took turns performing their sets, resting while the other man trained. By what appeared to be Oslans third set, he was hitting failure and applied what seemed like a lot of pressure to keep his back against the pad. Walker’s upper body appeared more static during his demanding reps.
Walker called Oslan out for adding too much swing to his reps and compelled him to slow down the eccentric portion of the movement to stay more stable on the seat. It was effective, albeit much more difficult, judging from the profanities Oslan yelled to help him lock out each rep.
After the hamstring curls concluded, the two Olympia competitors switched to the leg press and loaded what could have been every weight plate in the gym. For Walker, it was 11 45-pound weight plates on each side, meaning each rep was 990 pounds, not including the weight of the leg press. With the weight of the apparatus, he was almost surely over the 1,000-pound mark. Both men trained to failure in every set.
Following the heavy leg presses, Walker and Oslan moved to the Hack squat machine and performed tempo sets of 15 reps. The first five reps were slow and controlled, the middle five reps were for speed, and the last five sets mimicked the first five. While the size of Walkers’ legs only allowed him to go so deep, both men moved through their full range of motion, achieving maximum knee flexion each rep. This put much more emphasis on their quads. They both started at 180 pounds and increased the weight by 90 pounds with each subsequent set.
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Walker and Oslan returned to a different leg press machine with a high position that puts more emphasis on the glutes. Unlike their previous sets, which went straight to failure, these sets were reps in their midrange with a short rest without leaving the machine. This allowed both men to hit a higher rep range overall and achieve a bigger pump. Walker noticeably had his feet positioned lower on the platform than Oslan, signaling that he was putting more bias on his quads for this workout.
The bodybuilding duo closed out their leg session with sets on the adductor machine and several sets of seated calf raises. Walker pointed out that when it comes to legs, it doesn’t take much — three main movements sandwiched with some hamstring and calf training.
Upcoming Contests
Oslan recently finished in fourth place at the 2022 New York Pro. He is scheduled to compete in two more contests: the 2022 Chicago Pro on July 22-23, 2022, and the 2022 Tampa Pro on Aug. 5-6, 2022. Walker is not slated to compete until the 2022 Mr. Olympia contest on Dec. 16-18, 2022, in Las Vegas, NV. His fifth-place finish at his Olympia debut in 2021 secured his slot for 2022. We’ll see if all these leg days with premiere bodybuilders as training partners will enable him to topple the two-time reigning Mr. Olympia champion Mamdouh “Big Ramy” Elssbiay.
Featured image: @nick_walker39 on Instagram
