Most Effective Leg Workouts
Many people in the gym overlook the legs, and that’s a shame, because your legs are your locomotor unit and your foundation and you can’t build a strong body without laying the groundwork.
The qudraceps, hamstrings and calves are the three sections of your legs that require equal attention and lots of work to get strength and size gains.
The core of all leg exercises is the SQUAT, which may be up for debate now (i’ll explain later). Because you are moving your body, as well as the weight through space, when doing squats, you will activate over 200 individual muscles with every rep.
Squats blast your glutes, upper hamstrings and quads like no other exercise, not the leg extension or the leg press. The crucial part of squats is doing the exercise in correct form, and doing so is critical to make the most out of every move as well as to avoid injury.
When done correctly, you will use your hip extensors to get moving off the bottom of the stroke and then the quads will kick in at the top or lock-out portion of the exercise. Keep your shoulder blades collapsed together and your chest out and use your butt to hunt for something to sit on as you descend, stop when your thighs are at or just past parallel and then push through your heels and butt to drive yourself back up. You can vary your foot position to accent adductors or abductors.
Now that I’ve spent all that hot air telling you how to do squats, I’m going to recommend that you don’t do them, here’s why. Turns out the limiting factor on squats is your low back and in that bilateral squat position it’s not as stable as it could be, and therefore, you are more prone to injury there.
Your lumbar spine and S1 vertebrae are locked together and more stable in a one foot forward stance and therefore you can drive more work to your legs that way. So my recommendation is to sack squats in favor of split squats. This is like doing a lunge, but, you don’t come out of the lunge position until you are done with your reps and then you switch legs and do the other side.
This is also the reason it’s more functional, we are designed to walk, and that stance imitates a step. You can do this with barbells, dumbbells, kettlebells, resistance bands, sand bags and TRX suspension straps. I explain more about lunges in a little while. I will post a video on split squats in the near future.
The same with every exercise, stretches must first be performed before squats, however, it is better if you perform the stretches after every set.
Since we’re talking about squats, you must include the HACK SQUAT (using the machine) in your routine to bombard not just your quads but your abductors & adductors. Your abductors and adductors are notoriously hard at work, but the Hack Squat really targets them. You can place emphasis on your gluts and quads depending on the placement of your feet on the platform. A wide stance will emphasize your adductors, narrow will get a little more abductors. Feet forward will get more glutes and feet under you or back further will emphasize quads (careful not to hurt your knees on these).
Another quality leg exercise is the STRAIGHT-LEGGED DEADLIFT. This exercise assaults your upper hamstrings and glutes, and forces you to keep your lower back flexible and strong, too. Once again, collapse your shoulder blades together and stick your chest out.
You want to start with a comfortable, but challenging weight, and perform these by using a mixed grip on the barbell (one hand palm up and the other palm down), then lower the weight while keeping your legs and back straight.
Keep your knees bent a little. Buttocks pushed out and your shins as close to the bar as possible. To feel fatigue in your upper hamstrings and glutes, you’ll have to perform either a good number of reps.
Another great exercise is the LUNGE. While paying attention to proper posture, next up will be lunges that will work on your hip extensors which are your glutes and upper hamstrings. When lunges are done with improper posture and bad form the load is thrown onto your knee extensors, your quads.
Unless you want your knees to give out, try asking for a coach to show you the proper posture, especially if you feel your lunges and deep squats affecting your knees. It’s very effective when you lunge with a barbell, as it requires you to utilize your balance and stabilizers as you do each rep. You can do lunges with dumbbells, too, but you can’t use as much weight.
Three other great tools to do lunges with are: 1) Resistance bands, you can use the bands for either resistance or assistance. In my humble opinion, these are the ultimate tools for doing lunges, hell, you can use a barbell and use the band at the same time. 2) TRX suspension straps. You can use the bands with this also. 3) Sandbags, due to the shape and ever shifting nature, these require different gripping and/or carrying strategies and more core stabilization. Yes, you can use bands at the same time.
Developing the calves is also another important thing to remember as they will increase your vertical leaping activity not to mention balance out the legs.
After looking at so many different calves’ exercises, DONKEY PRESS is perhaps the most aggressive in building strength and size.
Form is critical for the donkey press, make sure you keep your knees straight and plantar and dorsiflex your ankles as far as you can, this bent over position adds a prestretch to the back of your legs and especially your calves.
Try to remember that injuries are possible if you are doing these leg exercises. So proper form and being honest with yourself regarding how much weight you can successfully lift.
Best Chest Training
To build a bigger chest, concentrate on the fibers that produce strength more than the ones that produce stamina . Those “fast twitch” fibers will tend to grow larger and give your chest more size.
How do you do that? By diversifying your workout and emphasizing low-reps and heavier-weight in each of your sets. You can also do an explosive, fast movement on the concentric part of the movement. For instance, off the bottom of the pushup you can push hard and fast so that your hands come off the floor and you clap your hands together, then return to the down position slowly for a 2 or 3 count, then repeat.
Some people will disagree with me on this one, but it works for me. The Best Chest Exercise is the WEIGHTED DIP… no contest! Why? When you perform dips and pushups, you move your body through space rather than iron.
This is a important concept to understand, because, moving your body through space (instead of moving iron through space) is more challenging to your central nervous system, which amplifies your brain-to-muscle connections and this causes you to recruit more muscle in every exercise.
Now, you’ll work your triceps tremendously when doing a WEIGHTED DIP as well, but you’re also working your chest at the same time. You’ll need a dip belt to do these (or a simple strap or jump rope will do the job), and you’ll have to work your way up to a decent weight, but by the time you’re doing 8 reps with a 100 lbs on the dip belt, you’ll see the improvement in your chest size and strength like no other exercise.
Push-ups are next on the agenda, and because you need to hold a plank while you’re doing them, they also work your core stability.
Also, there are so many variants of the PUSHUP that are even more explosive. One of those is the MEDICINE-BALL ARCHBISHOP PUSH-UP; a long name, but this exercise works.
What you do is put 3 to 5 medicine balls in a semicircle, then get in the push-up position and put both hands on the ball to the far right; your chest should be over the ball and your feet must stay anchored throughout this exercise.
Now, move your left hand to the ball at the left and do a push-up, then bring your right hand to that ball. You want to continue moving left, doing push ups until you get to the last ball on the left. Then work your way back across the balls. That’s one rep.
The reason why you want to use the medicine ball is, when you put your hands on a ball, the inherent instability forces your core to work 20% harder than when you do a regular push-up, so this exercise trains your abs and hips to remain stable longer.
You’ll also want to do WEIGHTED PUSH-UPS, in which your workout partner puts a weight on your back, between your shoulder blades and then do a superset with LYING CABLE FLIES… and be sure to hold the contraction at the top of the exercise for three seconds, and then take 5-seconds to lower your arms back to the starting position.
Keep your form strict and clean to both prevent injury and to keep from cheating. However, It is acceptable to cheat and heave ho on the last couple of reps.
You can also use resistance bands to do weighted pushups or dips. They don’t require a partner, travel easily and won’t ding the floor. For pushups, just put the band behind your back. you can put it on your lower back to work your core more or up around your shoulder blades. Now put your hands into the band loop and pin it to the floor and go to town. If it’s to loose at the bottom of the stroke, just put a loose overhand knot in the center of the band and you’re set.
For dips, drape the band around the back of your neck so it comes down the front of your shoulders and then place your hands in the band and grab on to the dip bar and have a field day.
The band can also be used to assist both of these exercises should you not have the strength, initially , to do them.
The last exercise that we suggest is the BENCH PRESS. And this isn’t because the bench press is a weak chest exercise, far from it. This exercise is essentially irreplaceable when it comes to chest exercises, and no man should completely eliminate the bench press from his workout routine.
Keep in mind that you can do the bench either, flat, incline or decline and you can use barbells or dumbbells.
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