Lower body training is a love/hate relationship for a lot of people. We enjoy what It does to our body but It doesn’t feel great as we are going through It.
Making sure we are doing the RIGHT things is always key. We want to be efficient and effective in the gym, otherwise things take longer, no one wants that.
So what should the leg exercises be? How often should I do them?
I want to lay out the lower body training that has worked for me and my clients over time. Just like always, there are exceptions to everything, so we still need to experiment and find out what works best for us on an individual level.
For most people, a lower body exercise can be added into every workout. A full body plan will incorporate at least one leg exercises each workout. Some more advanced trainees can do a set leg workout each week but be careful there, It’s easy to overreach and in some cases does more harm than good.
With these workouts we want to make sure we are
1.) strengthening weak areas and
2.) working on all aspects of the lower body
When I say work on weak areas, we all know that some area of our body is weaker than another. For most of us, we sit down alot so our glutes and hamstrings aren’t very strong (in most cases, the hamstrings need work). Once we know that, we can target that area each week.
With that, we will not neglect other areas to let the weak spots “catch up”. Still work on other areas and movements and keep working toward getting better and stronger in those areas.
The main movements to focus on:
-Squat pattern
-Hinge pattern
-Single leg
We don’t just focus on particular muscles, we focus on particular movements. I see this a lot in a training program where they want to target the glutes. The main movements are kickbacks and bandwalks with no addition of Romanian deadlifts or split squats. Now this is not wrong, they both target that area but one set of movements has a lot more carry over and can add a greater load during those movements.
So let’s look at examples of these movements:
1.) Squat Pattern
-Back squats
-Front squats
-Goblet squats
-Heels elevated squats
-Sumo squats
-Landmine squats
-Isometric squats
-Rack squats
-Box squats
-Squat to box
-Banded squats
2.) Hinge Pattern
-Deadlifts
-Deficit deadlifts
-Romanian deadlifts
-Hip thrust
-Pull throughs
-Kettlebell swings
-Trap bar deadlift
-Trap bar RDL
-Good mornings
3.) Single Leg Movements
-Split squat
-Front foot elevated split squat
-Rear foot elevated split squat
-Sled push
-Single leg RDL
-Single leg hip thrust
-Reverse lunge
-Walking lunge
-Cossack squat
-Step up
Now all these exercises target different areas. So if you were going to add in two leg exercises to a full body workout think about the movement + the muscle.
We want two different movements and two different muscle groups.
Example:
Back squat + Single leg RDL
Deadlift + Goblet squat
Rear foot elevated SS + Heels elevated squat
On the same token, it’s not always beneficial to add in two movements that require heavy weight or major muscles–> Back squat + Deadlift.
This can be too much for one day. In many cases I encourage most people to focus on one bigger movement and one movement that may cause less stress on the body. Maybe a day where I am doing deadlifts, it’s a good time to add in step ups to focus on the lowering of the motion and use some lighter load.
There is one final thing I want to plug in here. Movements that do not fall into these categories are not useless.
Things such as:
-Leg extension
-Leg curl
-Stability ball leg curls
-Calf raises
-Tib raises
-TKEs
These movements still have their place in a training program, focus more on the 3 main movements above and add these things in when needed/wanted.
In good health,
Jeff
P.S Whenever you are ready, here are 3 ways I can help you change the way your body looks and feels…
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