Jay Cutler Revisited His 2009 ‘Quad Stomp’ Leg Workout at 53—Here’s What Still Works
UPLIFT IRON CLUBJay Cutler’s 2009 Mr. Olympia comeback is remembered for one pose more than almost anything else: the quad stomp. The image worked because his legs looked balanced, dense and brutally detailed—not simply because he had added more scale weight.
More than a decade after his final contest, Cutler recently trained legs again with Hany Rambod and revisited some of the ideas behind that comeback. The session was not a nostalgia stunt built around reckless poundages. It was a useful look at how a retired champion now keeps the qualities that made his legs famous while adjusting volume, exercise choice and effort to suit a different stage of his lifting life.
For ordinary lifters, that distinction matters. The most useful lesson is not to copy a seven-exercise pro-bodybuilder workout exactly. It is to understand why the order works, why Cutler still favors certain machines and why a veteran with nothing left to prove is willing to stop short of the kind of soreness that once came with contest prep.
Why Cutler Starts by Waking Up the Hamstrings
Cutler has long been a hamstrings-first leg trainee. In the recent session, the workout opened with a seated leg curl, moved to a kneeling single-leg curl and then used dumbbell Romanian deadlifts before the heavy quad work began.
That sequence makes sense for someone whose quads have historically dominated his lower-body look. Pre-training the hamstrings gives the back of the thigh meaningful work before fatigue from squatting patterns takes over. It also warms the knees and hips without immediately loading the spine or asking for maximal force production.
For a recreational lifter, the idea can be simplified. Two or three controlled sets of seated or lying leg curls before squats can be useful when hamstrings are a weak point or when the knees simply feel better after some flexion work. There is no need to turn the warm-up into a failure marathon. The target is a strong contraction, better joint readiness and enough hamstring stimulus that the posterior thigh does not remain an afterthought.
The Romanian deadlift adds a different job. Curls train knee flexion; RDLs load the hamstrings at longer muscle lengths through hip extension. Pairing the two before quad work gives the session a more complete posterior-chain foundation.
The Quad-Stomp Look Was Built With Isolation Before Load
Leg extensions came before the heavier squat patterns in Cutler’s session. That is classic bodybuilding logic: isolate the target muscle, establish a strong contraction and then carry that local fatigue into compound work.
This is not automatically superior to squatting first. If your primary goal is maximizing squat strength, pre-fatiguing the quads would usually be counterproductive. But if the goal is hypertrophy, there is value in using a stable isolation exercise to make the quads work hard without needing enormous systemic loads.
Cutler also made an interesting point about his current training: he tends to repeat the same machines and exercise order rather than constantly searching for novelty. That is boring in the best possible way. When movements stay consistent, it becomes much easier to judge whether reps are cleaner, loads are progressing and the target muscle is actually doing more work.
For most lifters, one or two leg-extension sets taken close to failure before a hack squat can create a huge quad stimulus with less weight than would otherwise be necessary. The trade-off is that the compound lift will feel harder, so the load should be selected accordingly.
Hack Squats Are Still the Main Event
Of all the movements discussed around Cutler’s legendary leg development, the hack squat remains the clearest centerpiece. He has credited it with helping build the outer sweep and deep quad detail that made the 2009 pose so memorable.
The machine works well for bodybuilding because it removes much of the balancing demand of a free-weight squat. The torso is supported, the path is predictable and the lifter can focus on knee flexion and pushing through the platform. That does not make it easy; it makes the difficulty more local.
Rambod pushed Cutler to work, but Cutler was noticeably less interested in proving how much punishment he could tolerate. His reason was simple: he did not want to be excessively sore. That is a useful shift in priorities. Hypertrophy training should create enough disruption to stimulate adaptation, not so much that the next several days are spent limping through basic movement.
If hack squats fit your knees and hips, use a controlled eccentric, reach the deepest position you can own without the pelvis folding badly, and drive up without bouncing out of the bottom. Progress can come from load, reps, range of motion or cleaner execution. It does not have to come from adding plates every week.
Belt Squats Let You Push Legs Without Making the Spine the Limiter
Cutler followed the hack squat with belt squats. That pairing is especially useful late in a leg workout because the belt transfers load through the hips rather than asking the upper back and spine to support another heavy barbell.
Rambod also paid attention to Cutler’s foot position, noting the lasting effect of an old foot injury on how one heel wants to rotate. The lesson for everyone else is not to copy Cutler’s exact stance. It is to notice what your own feet, knees and hips are doing when fatigue rises.
A stance that looks symmetrical from across the gym can still feel very different side to side. If one heel continually lifts, one knee caves or one hip shifts, reducing load and adjusting the setup is usually smarter than forcing the body into an arbitrary position. The machine is there to train the legs, not to win an argument with your anatomy.
The session finished with hip abduction work, giving the glutes a direct final stimulus. Taken together, the workout covered knee flexion, hip hinging, knee extension, heavy quad-dominant squatting and hip abduction. That is a broad lower-body session, but the structure is coherent rather than random.
The Uplift Iron Club take: Cutler’s current leg training is valuable precisely because it is less theatrical than his contest-prep reputation. Hamstrings get attention before dominant quads, isolation work makes later compounds more targeted, stable machines let him train hard without chasing unnecessary risk, and exercise consistency makes progression easier to judge. The 2009 quad stomp was an extreme bodybuilding result, but the training logic behind balanced development still translates.
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