What's up guys Steve Cook here from fitnessculture.com. I am in sunny Sydney, Australia and today I'm going to go over with you. My favorite exercise to target one of the most talked about are questions body parts of the leg. So I always get this question Steve how do I get a bigger tear drop muscle also known as the vastest medialis. So your vastest medialis is just above your knee and just on the inside there. So it's that teardrop muscle that bodybuilders love to have but it's a really hard one to get. It's really hard to train just this area. Today we're going to be looking at it from a bodybuilder standpoint, how to develop that. But it's also a good practice because it's going to promote a healthy knee. There are three things we really want to concentrate on when we're talking about the vastest medialis. The first is our toe position. So our toe position is going to come into play whether it's a squat or leg press or leg extension. The second thing is it's going to be really our center of gravity and that has to do with our toes but it also has to deal with our heels and then the tracking of our knees over our toes. And the last thing we're going to talk about is overloading the muscle at the bottom of the movement. So you're going to see a lot of deep deep squatting along with one and a quarter movements because that is where we're really overloading and we're activating the most VMO. So a lot of people out there you know they don't they're really careful when they do squats. They want big numbers so they really concentrate on hitting 90 degrees. If you want to develop glutes and obviously we want to do that as well when we start talking about the VMO we're going to get deep we're going to get nice and low on things. That that has to be one thing right away we look at doing when we couple that in with our our toe placement and our knees over the toes. We're going to notice that our heels want to start coming up and that is why we're going to bring in a slam board and apply on things. Doing this is going to allow us to continue to push through the the heels on our squat movements but also it's going to keep our center of gravity upright. So if I'm here and my toes start coming up what happens? My chest falls over my knee I become off balance. So doing things on a slam board it allows us maximum contraption of the VMO getting nice and low chest is nice and tall and as we come up we're pushing through the heels coming up just shy of locking out. I don't want to be there I want to be here. I want to do four sets of this exercise after your warm-ups and we're really shooting for that 10 to 15 rep range as I get you know into my sets I might start at 14 12 10 and I just try to stay at 10 for these you know my goal here is until loaded up with weight you know obviously see we don't have a ton of weight on there but it's all about that control as we go down and I definitely feel it all over. Next exercise and we've shown you three different variations of it but basically it's a single leg squat or in this case a single leg step up. We're going to be sitting up the leg we're working knees going to be tracking over the toe we're going to press up and then with our off leg I'm just going to keep it straight go down until I touch and then back up I never want to be pressing off with this leg here this leg is just hanging out go down touch come up this will eventually graduate to a pistol squat so if you have it there we're going to be moving over to a taller box and from here we're just going to continue on our single leg squat on this my knee is well over my toe there keep your hands out here don't want to use any weight yet trying for at least eight reps press up keeping that knee and toe in the same line and from there you can graduate to using a weight I don't need to do that right now my legs are tired enough they're using body weight on this it's just fine but again this will translate if you ever start doing single leg squats single leg pistol squats woo my flexibility and the fact that I'm a little bit fatigued in the legs right now pistol squats are in no next up in our BMO training you want to be a leg press typically we're just going to be working our legs doing a standard leg press our feet are going to be in the middle we're just going to drop those to the bottom you can see my toes are actually elevated on here as well nice and slow down all the way up a quarter back down all the way up we got four sets shooting for eight reps of one and a quarter so it's a lot of time under tension about a maximizing the load at the bottom of the movement next up we're back to a single leg exercise a Bulgarian split squat what we're going to be doing here we're going to have dumbbells we can also do these with a the barbell on your back I like doing the dumbbells we're going to have back leg on the bench so that rear leg elevated as we go down once again you see that knee tracking over all the way down get depth and then press back up keeping that knee and toe in line I don't want a kaving in or going out but that knee is going to come over top so we're going to be doing each leg individually 10 to 12 reps if you want have recently started doing these also on a slam board nice and high I'm going to be doing them on there if you can graduate towards this feel free you want to make sure though that you've mastered the basic movement first the final movement for our VMO training is going to be a leg extension and I know leg extension works primarily your whole leg extended down a quarter back extended all the way down to get a nice stretch in there biggest thing is instead of just keeping our close straight we're going to go slightly pointed out there you can just feel it you just point your toe and go here you get a better contraction in the VMO give your last thing here a little bit higher rep range again we get the one and a quarter rep but we're going to do 10 total so it's really almost like 20 reps and then again you can do this together or single leg especially if you have one leg that's lagging a little bit I'd recommend doing an isolation and really focusing on doing the same number of sets and reps on each leg but only going as heavy as that smaller or weaker leg or less to find leg you know can handle that leg might be less defined for genetic reasons or you know let's pretend that you know you're always looking at one leg I tend to do that with my arms I always tend to look in the mirror on my left arm it's like hey man switch it up look at your other leg focus on that other leg it's hard when you talk about mind most connection with two VMOs where is your mind connecting with