FT Questions....

[Scott Stevenson]

Because COVID restrictions my gym has strange restrictions in place, it's a strange set up anyway where it's split into two rooms - one room that they call "the cross-training room" has a lot of open space, squat racks, barbells and benches and another thats the "weight room" that has machines, dumbbells, cables, one barbell bench rack and a strange "360 smith machine" type thing.
They've closed the "cross-training room" and taken away all but 6 of the 45lb plates, which aren't enough to challenge even 1 leg on the sled leg press, the machine leg press has a poor ROM and I can do 25+ reps on the whole stack, and to do traditional squats on this 360 smith thing feels awful...
I've managed to work the 360 smith thing and make some decent smith machine squats by keeping it at the back of the rack and I've loaded up Bulgarian Split Squats and work them quite well with single leg knee extension and hamstring work.
As I'm making progress well on these two I just thought I would hammer away at these two rather than awkwardly trying to fashion something else. Then when I get into my 2nd blast I could look into a 3rd grouping that I can also stay consistent with and use for the long-term future (like an actual back squat or sled leg press)

Does that make sense? I am open to being wrong about this if your expertise suggests something different or has any other input

Yes, it makes sense that your gym (b/c of the above) is poorly equipped and you've not come up with any other exercises that would work well for Thigh Loading sets.

I'm not sure what you're actually doing as far as Compounds and Isolation exercises (or how grouped) for your Thigh Loading sets though.

Either way, it (still) doesn't matter really practically speaking (I think) as you're moving in ~3 weeks and changing gyms so your exercise options will be different and hopefully more varied. (If this is true, I don't follow your statement, "Then when I get into my 2nd blast I could look into a 3rd grouping..." as you would have hopefully be able to easily come up with 3+ groupings.)

-S