killer leg workout #legday #health #fitness

How to Design a Leg Workout Using the 15 Best Exercises What is the best leg day workout? Is 5 exercises enough for legs? Are 4 exercises enough for leg day? Is a 10-minute leg workout good? 7 Killer Leg Workouts For Men at the Gym "Leg day"—the very phrase conjures up images of nausea, days of hobbling, and legs that feel like jello. The feelings may be universal, but bodybuilders looking to annihilate legs have countless workout options at their disposal. While most workouts start with some variation of the squat—widely acclaimed as the best lower-body movement—exercise choice, foot position, and advanced training techniques all allow you to emphasize one particular area of the legs over others. That's great if you want to thicken up your quads, fill out your glutes, or beef up your hamstrings because of a weakness—or simply because you want to prioritize an area for a length of time. Each of the seven leg workouts below has a different focus. Find one that suits your needs for the next 4-8 weeks before switching to another specialized program. Or simply follow a solid overall mass-building plan like the one listed under Goal 1 Goal 1: More Overall Leg Mass Mass-building comes with a set of rules. That means starting your workout with the most challenging exercises and heaviest loads, hitting the thighs from a variety of angles, keeping the volume (number of total sets and reps) high, and training to muscle failure. Altering your foot placement on the leg press allows you to recruit leg musculature in slightly different ways. Putting your feet up higher on the sled shifts some of the emphasis from the quads to the hams and glutes because a greater degree of hip flexion/extension is taking place. Also, don't shortchange the depth of your knee bend—which should reach 90 degrees—by going too heavy—that also limits glute and hamstrings activation. Unless you're following a pre-exhaust routine, save the single-joint movements for last. Goal 2: Greater Leg Definition Simply doing more work with light weight for high reps isn't enough to get you lean. To keep your metabolism high, you still need that stimulus for building and keeping muscle size. That will help boost excess post-exercise oxygen consumption (EPOC), which roughly translates to the number of calories you burn after your workout is over. Goal 3: Starting Strong Learning to squat can be a challenge, which is why the simple goblet version is a great place to start. The idea here is to learn and practice movement patterns before loading them with heavier weights or graduating to more complex moves. Goal 4: Emphasize Your Quads Because multijoint leg movements work your legs from top to bottom, it's impossible to completely isolate one area over another. However, you can emphasize one area over another. In this case, we're trying to maximize the range of motion of the knee joint while limiting the range of motion at the hip joint. One way to do this is by changing up your foot position on machine exercises. The front squat also emphasizes the quads more than, say, a barbell back squat does by shifting your center of gravity forward. With heavy partials, you're not going deep, so you can really overload the quads; put on up to 30 percent more weight than you normally use, but go only part of the way down Goal 5: Emphasize Your Glutes While you tried to minimize hip flexion/extension in the quad-focused workout, here you want to maximize it. Do that by choosing exercises and foot positions that allow the glutes to be trained through their full range of motion. Be sure to descend fairly deep in all squatting motions; otherwise, you'll limit glute activation. The workout again follows a reverse-pyramid protocol, which allows you to take more total sets to muscle failure. As the rep target goes up, be sure to lighten the weight commensurately. The last exercise, the Romanian deadlift, is considered a hamstring exercise, but it focuses on the upper region as well as the glutes, especially the glute-ham tie-in Goal 6: Emphasize Your Hamstrings Hams shouldn't be an afterthought, and not just for aesthetic reasons; they also support knee-joint integrity. Most bodybuilders are familiar with the family of leg-curl movements, which can be done lying, seated, standing, or with one knee supported on a bench. Don't forget to work the hams from the hip joint as well, which means doing Romanians. Often confused with the stiff-legged deadlift (a lower-back exercise) and even the conventional deadlift (with Romanians, the plates never touch the floor), it's an effective move for the upper hams where they tie in with the glutes. Good form is critical with RDLs—keep your back flat and never try to achieve excessive range of motion if it causes your back to round. Goal 7: Pre-exhaust Your Legs This workout starts by targeting just your quads with a single-joint movement. #gymworkout​ #gym​ #fitness​ #shorts​ #legday​ #legworkout​