Beware when you hear:
- I run + walk a lot that counts as leg day.
- Let me just do 1000 lunges/steps!
- I just want a nice butt & don’t care about the rest…
- I’m doing bodyweight high intensity training until I sweat!
Bad News
A well-structured leg day is a lot more than just moving your lower body extremities until you break a sweat.
- First, focus on larger muscle groups, like glutes and lower back, quadriceps and hamstrings.
- Then fatigue the smaller muscles groups in isolated exercises. It’s ok to break lower body muscles into two groups and hit them on different days if you train 4+ days a week… however if you’re a newbie, or lift 2-3 days a week, gotta address all leg muscles
- For example, start with a complex, heavy-lift, such as variations of squat, deadlift, or Olympic lifting (ONLY if you have mastered the ones above and are powerful and flexible enough). Those are very energy-consuming, build strength and power fast and have an amazing effect on your metabolism.
- Move on to cables, resistance bands and machine exercises to wrap up.
- Do not forget to WARM UP your WHOLE BODY dynamically and do joint gymnastics!!! 10 min of running is NOT a holistic warm up for these purposes.
- Roll out and stretch after the workout.
Of course, there is a lot more that goes into it, but let’s save that for the upcoming posts If you have questions about the exercises above and #warmup routines, comment below.
p.s. I love how unenthused Hera (bottom left corner) is with my posing practice