Try The Rock’s ‘Brutal’ Leg Routine For Lower Body Strength

Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson has a reputation as one of the strongest men in Hollywood and has a real passion for bodybuilding and fitness.

He posts a lot about his athletic lifestyle on his Instagram account, including content about workouts and nutrition.

In a recent post, he shared a relentless leg session, writing: "Absolutely brutal leg training today but, always grateful to put the work in and do my best to raise my personal bar.”

Here’s a look at what The Rock’s session involved.

The Leg Workout

Johnson warms up for about 30 minutes before the workout actually begins, doing some stretching, core work, foam rolling and activation exercises like leg extensions and curls.

He then moves into what he calls “giant sets”, which consist of four to five different exercises. Each set has a total of around 15-20 reps and there are four to five sets to do in total.

The real killer is that there’s no rest between sets, with Johnson hopping straight to the next group of exercises after completing each one.

He increases the weight on each set and will use a combination of single and double-leg exercises. Johnson will also change up his stance so he covers all angles and movement patterns.

He’ll then finish up with a superset involving walking chain lunges using a 55kg chain to failure, and slow Romanian deadlifts using a one-second pause at the bottom.

Low Weight, High-Quality Reps

The most striking feature of this session is the high number of reps with very little rest.

Johnson says he trains this way because injuries over the years have forced him to keep the weight down.

This means he prioritises quality technique on each rep and focuses on eccentric contraction to increase time under tension.

"You’ll see the weight I use is never an insanely heavy amount," Johnson wrote. "I’ve learned it’s not how much weight we use, but rather the quality of the reps and mind/muscle connection that matters most.

“Truth is, over the years I’ve actually learned to train HARDER. But, in order to train harder, I had to learn how to train SMARTER."