Legs workout
1. Leg workout should be heavy
Most bodybuilders know that leg training is the heaviest workout of the week in the literal sense of the word, due to the impressive weight and high volume of load required to work out large muscle groups. Ardent fans of strength training are well familiar with prayers to the porcelain gods after particularly heavy leg training.
On the other hand, simple Amateur athletes often look at leg training the same way as they look at arm training, but without the benefit of looking good in a t-shirt. They'll be happy to skip a couple of leg workouts.
A day of leg training requires special psychological and physical training. When it comes time to swing your legs, you need to get far out of your comfort zone on the day of training, otherwise you will not make the desired progress.
You can train your legs like any other part of the body, or you can give your legs a hell of a load. If you don't feel it after training, you haven't worked hard enough! I'm not saying you should crawl out of the gym, but climbing the stairs should be a real challenge!
The most difficult and exhausting workout of the week requires complete psychological and physical readiness. This means that before training, you should rest well, eat well and take a pre-workout complex that will help you continue to move forward with your last strength. You need to mentally tune in to the fact that the next workout will be better than the previous one. And do not hope that at the end of the workout you will have enough strength to train another muscle group!
2. leg Press will never replace squats
For every bodybuilder who likes to train their legs and regularly does squats, there are a dozen athletes who hate them. They find any excuse not to squat. A favorite excuse is to convince yourself that the leg press is just as good as the squats. After all, it involves the same muscle groups, and you can lift a ton of iron!
Of course, just because the knee and hip joints are flexed, the leg press does not become equal to squats. There is no doubt that squats give a greater load and include more muscle fibers than the leg press. Squats require the participation of the entire kinematic chain with the simultaneous work of all the muscles, which makes them the best in terms of functionality, mass development and strength.
Squats with the appropriate volume and intensity of the load optimize the natural secretion of anabolic hormones. After multi-joint exercises, athletes have higher levels of growth hormone and testosterone in their blood than after exercises that load less muscle mass. There is a direct relationship between the amount of testosterone produced and the amount of muscle mass involved in performing the movement.
Although the fight between free-weight squats and squats in the gym has ended in favor of free weight, you should not limit yourself to just squats with a "high" barbell, which are often called squats by bodybuilders. Front squats (with a barbell on the chest) will help shift the focus from the buttocks to the quadriceps by shifting the center of gravity forward.
In powerlifter squats with a " low " bar, you lower the bar lower — to the level of the rear deltas, not the trapezoids. This makes you lean forward more and shifts the center of gravity slightly. You will immediately be able to take more weight only by increasing the participation of the buttocks and muscles of the back of the thigh and less activation of the lower quadriceps.
3. Do not squat while standing with your heels on a Board or pancakes
Have you ever asked yourself why a guy squats with his heels on a Board or small pancakes? With raised heels, the center of gravity shifts slightly forward, so the knees go forward more during the transition to the lower position. This shifts the focus of the exercise to the lower quadriceps. But the story doesn't end there. At the same time, the load on the cartilage and ligaments of the knee joints increases.
If your knees are all right, it doesn't matter — at least not yet. But almost all powerlifters with experience suffer from knee pain, so knowing about safer options for squats will not hurt.
"During squats, the load on the knee joint is already very high. Putting your heels on the Board can do more harm than good. Biomechanics plays a major role in the longevity of your joints, regardless of how healthy they are at the moment.
By far the best way to evaluate your technique from the point of view of knee joint safety is to put your feet on the floor or on the platform of the simulator and during the descending phase, check whether the knees do not go beyond the imaginary plane that passes through the toes. (When performing gakk-squats, this plane is located at a slight angle).
If your knees go beyond the imaginary plane, you put the joint under an undesirable load. Move your legs. Most likely, you need to raise them higher on the platform or set them further back when performing other exercises, lifts on the platform or lunges, so that you do not cross the plane of your toes. When applied to lunges, this means that you just have to take a slightly wider step.
4. Change the position of your feet to shift the focus of the exercise
Many of us pay little attention to the position of our feet during leg exercises. We put them somewhere between the width of the hips and the width of the shoulders and turn them slightly outward. There is no doubt that this is a solid Foundation from which to build.
But many leg exercises, especially simulators, make it possible to use a larger range of leg positions. Wide or narrow, high or low, or even exactly centered. Does it matter? One hundred percent!
If you put your feet too low on the platform, you risk getting your knees out of the plane of your toes. This position increases the load on the muscles around the knee joint and reduces the load on the glutes. This leads to more development of the quadriceps and less activation of the buttocks.
By analogy, raising your feet higher increases the degree of flexion and extension in the hip joints and reduces the amplitude of movement in the knees. Therefore, you train your glutes and upper back more effectively. Remember, this shift in emphasis is very relative. You can't completely isolate a single muscle.
Movements with a wide position of the feet work harder on the inner surface; on the contrary, a narrow position of the legs effectively loads the muscles of the outer surface of the hip. In any case, you have just learned about a lot of options for performing leg exercises that are especially useful when working on simulators.
5. Depth squats is the value
We've all seen a guy who hangs a ton of pancakes on a barbell before squats, but drops a few centimeters. Perhaps the ability to hold an impressive weight flatters his ego, but the muscle fibers will not agree with him. The so-called partial repetition does not involve all of the muscle fibers of the quads, not to mention the gluteal muscles. You just don't work out the muscle completely if you only do half or a quarter of the reps.
A deep squat puts more stress on the glutes and back muscles than surface squats. Try lowering yourself to a point where your hips are parallel to the floor and your knees are bent at about 90 degrees.
Depth of movement is very important for the development of the legs and buttocks. There is only one way to perform squats: to go completely down. Partial squats are equivalent to partial results if we are talking about creating harmoniously balanced leg muscles. If you want to create a perfect body, every inch is worth its weight in gold.
Consider that the buttocks and back of the thigh are working hard to control the degree of decline, but only really explode at the bottom point. Shallow squats train, first of all, the quadriceps, but not all of the quadriceps, but some of them, and this depends on the depth of the squat.
The rule applies not only to squats, but also to other multi-joint movements with knee flexion. Of course, you need to start with less weight and perform these movements in the full range of motion to fully develop your legs. But you will definitely develop them.
6. Use special exercises for the back of the hip
Some people think that squats and other leg extension movements are enough to pump the muscles of the back of the thigh. Meanwhile, research shows that although the back surface is involved in squats, the load on it is very limited.
Special exercises for the mass and growth of the muscles of the back surface are important, and they must be present in the weekly leg complex. Additional exercises for the back surface are good not only from the point of view of aesthetics, but also for the development of speed and strength indicators and the prevention of injuries to the knees, hip and lower back muscles.
Most of us are familiar with a group of exercises with leg bends, aimed at the muscles of the back surface. They can be performed sitting, standing, lying down, with support, or alternately with one leg. All of them are good for strengthening the back of the thigh.
Injuries to the back of the hip are very unpleasant. When the muscle group is relatively weak (compared to the quadriceps), there is a high risk of an anterior cruciate ligament injury or muscle sprain. To strengthen the stability and health of the knees, the quadriceps (the flexor muscle antagonists relative to the knee joint) should be stronger in a ratio of about 3:2 (they are stronger because they are larger and more often used in everyday activities).
You can find out by measuring your strength indicators: if your maximum is in leg extensions (single-jointed movement for quadriceps) is 10 reps with 70 kg, you should be able to do the same 10 reps with 45 kg in the prone leg flexion. If you can't bend your legs 10 times, your knees are more vulnerable to injury. At the very least, you should be aware of this so that you can focus on the weak link.
Because it is perfectly normal for women to have a lower ratio of quadriceps strength to posterior muscle strength — and for female athletes this ratio is even lower — they are even more at risk of muscle sprain and anterior cruciate ligament injury.
For your information, here's how the backside muscles work during squats: by controlling the downward phase, when the hips drop to the bottom of the squat, the quadriceps muscle fibers stretch and the backside muscles contract. The deeper you go, the more muscle fibers in the back surface get involved.
In addition, on the platform for gakk-squats, in the simulator for squats, in squats lying down and even in the press with your feet, you can put your feet very high. This reduces the activation of the quadriceps and increases the load on the buttocks and flexors. But you still need to add special exercises for the back of the hip.
7. Don't forget about hip joint movements
Most likely, you are familiar with the previously mentioned leg bends. What they have in common is flexion at the knee joints.
However, the posterior surface muscles can be worked out with movements in both the knee and hip joints, and you can focus on the upper parts of these muscles with movements in which you bend the pelvis. The best way to do this is to include dead deadlift in your training program. The emphasis here is not only on the upper parts of the back surface, but also on the buttocks, so tighten the buttocks in the standing position.
Technically, performing dead deadlift is harder than you think. Keep your back straight or with a slight bend. The knees should remain bent at a very small angle. Hold the bar close to your feet and do not try to lower it completely to the floor. The middle of the lower leg or so is ideal. Deadlift is performed by leaning forward and protruding the buttocks back, so that the bar should never touch the floor.
8. Pump your calves standing Up
Not all exercises for the lower leg muscles equally load the two main muscles of this area — the flounder and the calf.
Although most of the lower leg exercises are performed with straight legs, exercises with bent knees are very different. Since the calf muscle is attached above the knee joint, when the knee is flexed, it cannot contract at full capacity, and the flounder muscle takes the lion's share of the load. In exercises with straight legs, both muscles are included in the game. Therefore, the rise to the socks on straight legs (for example, the rise standing or exercise "donkey") works the calf muscle, while the rise to the socks sitting is more aimed at the flounder.
Here are the basic rules for creating powerful legs!
