If you look around the gym you will see guys with great biceps, excellent abs, wide shoulders, and chest. But you know what, the nicely sculpted upper body is a norm these days. If you really want to look great you should look down at your legs. Take a good look and think about how much time did you devote to developing your leg muscles.
The Best Quads Workout is the one that activates more than one muscle group at the same time. You shouldn’t have separate exercises for quads and glutes.
When you are doing a workout for one of these muscle groups you are activating the other as well. Many complex exercises as leg press and squats activate more than one muscle group making it impossible for you to isolate a single muscle.
The advantage of this is that you can make your training much more efficient and to activate a larger muscle mass with fewer exercises.
What’s even more important while we are doing complex exercises we can use heavier weights thus stimulating the muscle fiber with the weight that leads to maximum hypertrophy (maximal muscle growth).
Quads consist of four muscles joined together near the knee and those muscles are activated when you are doing movements that extend the knee.
There is only one exercise that isolates quads and that’s leg extension but more complex leg exercises activate the quads to some extent as well.
Warming Up
Make sure you warm-up before training. Warming up helps us to lift heavier weights and to stimulate a maximum number of muscle fibers.
What is the best way to warm up for leg workout? Start with one of the cardio machines to stimulate blood flow. Do cardio between seven and ten minutes exercising with low to moderate intensity.
When will you know you have warmed up enough? That’s easy. The moment you start sweating. Many people start their training with low-intensity extensions to warm up the quads. Instead of that, you can do leg press since it helps you warm up the hips as well. You will not warm up the glutes if you only do a leg extension to warm up.
You should not do more than three sets of leg presses with lighter weights and a large number of repetitions (between fifteen and twenty). After that, you can begin the workout.
Choose The Right Exercises
Now that you are all warmed up and ready to lift heavy weights do not forget to choose an exercise that allows you to do just that, and that is for sure, not the extension.
We usually have the most energy at the beginning of the workout, especially the leg workout, so it is necessary to choose some complex exercise.
Both squats and leg press are an excellent choice for this part of the workout, but perhaps the free weights exercises are better.
Free weights exercises make the muscles that support the weight work more to maintain balance and correct posture, and the muscle groups that assist during these exercises help us lift more, which means larger muscle stimulation.
Free weight squats not only activate quads and glutes; they also activate calves and tendons, and this makes them a very popular exercise for the beginning of the workout.
Squats with weights are the best quads exercise. Do not get fooled by those that tell you that squats are an advanced exercise. Start with lighter weights and learn the right technique.
While doing squats, make sure that the distance between your feet is your shoulder width (feet are aligned with shoulders). Do a full movement and repeat.
Choose Multiple Complex Exercises
Same as you are doing more than one chest press exercise, you should do more than one complex exercise for your legs. The idea here is to activate targeted muscle from different angles.
If you started your workout with squats, do leg press as your next exercise. No matter what exercise you chose to do, do it with the heaviest possible weights and as many repetitions as you planned to do.
It is possible that as your next exercise, you will do an exercise that is done on the machine if you have done your first exercise using free weights.
The main reason for that is that you used so much energy already doing the first exercise. Machines help us maintain balance while exercising.
In case you started with leg press, and you want to do squats next, it will be much more difficult for you to balance the weights.
Stepout Exercises For Glutes
Probably the best exercise for glutes is the step out. Most people can not do this exercise with heavyweights, so it is not necessary to do this exercise as the first exercise of your leg workout.
Make sure you are doing this exercise correctly since you already lost a lot of energy by this point in your workout.
Start this exercise with very light weights to get in shape and remember that the weights you will use to do this exercise should not be of the same weight as the weights that you used during your first exercise.
Start Isolating Specific Muscle Groups
Once you have done the harder bit of the workout, it is time to switch to isolated exercises. This is the bit of the training where you can do the leg extension that isolates quads.
Focus on the negative movement (lowering your legs) and lift the weight explosively. The other two excellent leg exercises for specific muscle groups are the ones done on the adductor machine that activates the muscles of the inner thigh and abductor machine that activates the muscles of the outer thigh.
You should not be doing these two exercises during every training. While doing these exercises, make sure you do them with the somewhat lighter weights but with a large number of repetitions.
Choose The Right Number Of Repetitions
People often wonder what weights they should lift while doing specific exercises, but that is something that each person should determine for themselves. Generally speaking, you should use the weights that allow you to do ten correct repetitions.
If those repetitions are done too quickly, then that means you should use heavier weights since the weights you are using are to light.
On the other hand, if you are already unable to do the sixth repetition, that means that the weight you are lifting is too heavy, and you should be using a lighter one.
When it comes to the number of repetitions, you should make sure that it always varies. You do not always have to do standard three sets of ten repetitions. If you, for example, do ten repetitions with 100kg after that, do eight repetitions with 110kg and then maybe fifteen repetitions with 90kg.
What is most important is to do the sets in a manner that does not allow the muscle to adapt. If the muscle adapts, the growth stops or slows down significantly.
Do not be afraid to use a new approach to this kind of workout. Make more variations in the number of repetitions during your leg workouts than you do for the upper body workouts. Experiment with sets of eight, ten, twelve, or fifteen repetitions.
Remember, if it were easy, it would not be effective, but if you stick to it and don’t give up, you will be amazed by the results you can achieve.
One more thing. If you can walk out of the gym lightly after the leg workout, go back in there, you haven’t done it properly!
These were just a few tips that will help you get perfectly sculpted legs. What is important for you to remember is that nothing happens overnight. It takes time and persistence to get where you want to be.
Try to work out at least five days a week doing leg workouts at least twice in those five days. Make sure that you have a healthy balanced diet, and you will have a healthy, perfectly sculpted body.
