#008 Everything You Need to Know About Training Legs

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Welcome to the Boats & Logs Lifting Club - and welcome back to all loyal members! I truly appreciate your strong support and how quickly we could form a fast-growing community that understands that building muscle is not rocket science. It only takes intense workouts, a good diet, and proper sleep.

After we have covered the best ways to train chest and back over the last weeks, we are looking at training legs today. What makes training legs special is that you can be incredibly flexible with your exercise selection, depending on what is fun to you, but we will come to this later.

For now, let’s do a quick recap on how muscles actually grow. If you already read my earlier editions or are aware of the concept behind growing muscle, feel free to skip this part and start with the leg anatomy.

How a muscle grows

As I have seen an influx of new readers, let’s quickly cover why we need to train to grow muscle, as it is important that everybody understands the concept behind hypertrophy.

Training serves a simple purpose: Triggering your body to grow muscle. You achieve this trigger by putting stress (in the form of training) on your body. Your body adapts to this stress by growing muscle. This is also called an adaptive response.

Consequently, everything you do in the gym serves a simple purpose: Providing a growth stimulus to your muscles.

While you rest, your body breaks down muscle proteins and replaces them with new ones. When you are in your 20s with normal protein intake and no training, this ongoing process will have no effect on your muscle mass.

But with the adaptive response, your body not only replaces muscle proteins, it also adds new ones, which leads to muscle growth (assuming you have a sufficient protein intake).

If you want to dive deeper into this concept, check out my former newsletter on what it takes to build muscle. But let’s get back to training legs and how we can provide a growth stimulus to them now.

Leg Anatomy

To grow impressive legs, you need to focus on four muscle groups: The Quadriceps (“quads”), the Glutes, the Hamstrings (“hams”), and the Calves.

The quads are the main muscle group of your front legs. They unite four different muscles to jointly move the knee and flex the hip. To get a feel for the muscles, sit on a chair with your hand on the quads and move your knee from the 90° angle up to a 180° angle. Congrats! Many of you have probably felt the Vastus Lateralis, Rectus Femoris, and Vastus Medialis consciously for the first time.

The hams are an incredibly strong muscle group and are comprised of three muscles: The Biceps Femoris, the Semimembranosus, and the Semitendinosus. The main functions of the hams are hip extension (think of a Romanian Deadlift) and knee flexion (think of a Leg Curl).

The Glutes include the Gluteus Maximus and Gluteus Medius. These muscles are incredibly important for stabilizing and moving the hip. Even for beginners, it’s very easy to flex these muscles. If you have no idea how to flex them, simply stand up and press your hip to the front.

Lastly, an often forgotten and undertrained muscle group are the calves. But that doesn’t mean that they aren’t supporting. They play a major role in moving your foot (running, walking, jumping,…)

Training the Quads

Before diving into how to train the quads best, let’s quickly remember how we can engage the quads: By moving and extending the knee.

You moved your knee earlier to feel your quads working. Now I ask you to do a similar exercise. Sit on a chair or your bed with your hands on your quads and stand up by pushing your legs up.

You should feel a strong contraction of your quads while doing this, and that’s no surprise: You just did a squat!

To really train the quads well, you should incorporate some kind of squat movement into your workout. A squat movement is defined as a movement where you move your knee between a 90° (or below) angle and a 180° angle.

This could be a classical Squat, a Bulgarian Split Squat, or the Leg Press. There are many different variations to do a squat movement.

Some of the best exercises for quads are:

• Bulgarian Split Squats

• Hack Squats

• Squats

• Lunges

• Leg Press

• Leg Extension

This wide variety of exercises allows you to pick exercises you particularly enjoy. You may be motivated by squatting heavy weights, or you follow a low-risk approach in regard to injuries and focus more on machines like Hack Squats and Leg Extensions. As always, it’s most important that you stick to the exercises, and that’s usually best achieved by picking exercises you enjoy.

But I would highly encourage you to perform (walking) Lunges or Bulgarian Split Squats regularly. The additional stabilization these exercises require may come with a lower overload you can apply, but having all joints work together to move and stabilize your body will keep you athletic once you get older.

Could you imagine your parents doing one of these exercises? Probably not…

Hamstrings

As written in the anatomy section, the main functions of the hams are hip extension and knee flexion. To train the hams properly, we should include exercises in our program that extend the hip and flex the knee.

Some of the best exercises for hams are:

• Romanian Deadlift

• Straight Leg Deadlift

• Deadlift

• Back Extension

• Hip Thrusts

• Leg Curl

Especially with the Deadlift, many people try to lift heavy in the range of 1-5 reps. And while this makes sense to develop strength, it is not necessary for hypertrophy. As my goal is purely muscle-building, I try to do at least 6 reps per set. By using slightly lighter weights, I can feel the muscle better and focus more on engaging the hams.

You should also keep in mind that the squat movements that primarily work the quads also work the hams and glutes to some degree. To put further emphasis on hams, you can change your foot positioning during the exercises.

By taking “longer steps” during Bulgarian Split Squats or Lunges, you are targeting the hams more. For Hack Squats and Leg Press, choose a higher foot position to target the hams more.

Calves

Growing calves can be quite a disappointing experience for some people. While some are born with big calves without training them much, others just can’t seem to grow them no matter how much they train.

And to some degree, that’s true and something you need to accept. Not everybody’s calves respond well to training. But still, training calves will result in bigger calves. Simple as that. If you stick to training your calves, you will be rewarded with bigger calves.

Most gyms have either a standing or seated calf raise machine. Both of them are totally fine to use. If your gym has both, you are lucky, and you can pick which machine feels better for you. But even if your gym has no dedicated machine for calves, you can use a leg press to do calf raises. All of these options work.

A Word about Glutes

While developing glutes is very important, I believe that you don’t need isolation exercises to grow your glutes. The beauty of this muscle group is that it is trained by both squat movements and hip extension movements.

So, if you are doing 4-6 sets in total for both quads and hams, you work the glutes during all those sets.

To make sure you are targeting the glutes properly, make sure to flex the hip at the top of your movement.

Considerations for Programming a Leg Day

The legs are a unique muscle group in the sense that they allow for a very high load. And that’s something you need to take advantage of when training legs. You won’t make progress moving light weights. You need to overload the legs with heavy weights.

A technique I like to overload the legs while also tiring out the legs with higher rep sets is using load sets and back-off sets. During the load set, you are working on strength, trying to move a heavy weight for lower reps, while you use the back-off set to work more in the higher rep range with lighter weight.

An example would be doing the first set of squats for 4-6 reps and the second set of squats for 10-12 reps (of course, taking both sets to failure).

As you already know, if you are a frequent Boats & Logs Lifting Club reader, you should do around 10 sets per week per muscle group. To give you an idea of what this could look like, here is an example if you are following a full body split 3 times per week: