How To Create Your Leg-Day Workout

Creating your Leg-Day.

Your leg day in the gym culture is the day you train your legs. The four main muscles that people work during leg days are the quadriceps, the hamstrings, the glutes, and the calves, but some people add some adductors work or some abdominal work.

Before we dive into how to create your perfect leg day, let's understand that I'll not be able to make a direct workout plan for leg days, since it depends on individual time spent in the gym (some people go to the gym three times a week and other six times a week). Therefore, I'll try to guide you at my maximum but I can't do everything, you'll have to be creative.

If you want the workout plans that I created, I have published some in the 11th bonus of my weight-loss course. If you want to check out the weight-loss course, click here.

Hitting the quads

Alright, we'll first start with what truly makes big legs impressive in my opinion: big quads. Quadriceps are the muscles at the front of your thigh. They are trained when you do any move that looks like a squat, a lunge, or a leg extension.

In other words, we will try to include these exercises in our routine. Firstly, you need to understand that in the entire week, throughout your workout(s), you need to do 10-12 sets for quadriceps per week to see great gains that will not induce too much fatigue (the more you do sets, the more you're fatigued, and it doesn't bring significantly higher results).

So, let's say you've chosen 10 sets of quadriceps training per week. This represents three different exercises: a squat, a lunge, and a leg extension.

So, if you train your legs two times a week, you could, for example, do on your first day two sets of squats, one set of lunges, and two sets of leg extensions, and on your second day two sets of lunges, one set of squat, and two sets of leg-extension.

I actually feel like maybe one set of leg extensions would be wiser as this exercise doesn't seem to be what really gives huge quads: you should rather focus on squats and lunges. But for the sake of "isolating" the quadriceps, I have put two sets.

So remember the SLE rule: Squat, Lunge, Extension. For example, to put it into practice, Bulgarian Split Squat, Walking Lunges, and Leg Extension (or Sissy Squat)

For people who train bodyweight, it's way more complicated. Using jump squats, pistol squats, box jumps, sissy squats, etc. But I'm not here to make a full-on article for any particular case of training because if I had to the article would be 200 pages long.

Hitting the hamstrings

If you've got big quads but you have small hamstrings, you will look ridiculous. Having proportional hamstrings or even quite big hamstrings is impressive, and it looks very esthetic. Hamstrings are trained when stretching them: such as Romanian deadlifts, deadlifts, good mornings, and kettlebell swings, leg curls for example.

In the entire week, you should do a weekly volume of sets around 8-10 sets per week for the hamstrings. The hamstrings don't need as much volume as the quadriceps. However, it still needs to be worked effectively if you want to keep the aesthetic of it.

So, if you've chosen 8 sets per week, this represents two exercises: a compound exercise and an isolation exercise. In other words, a Romanian deadlift/good morning/kettlebell swing and a leg curl.

To put it more concretely, if you train your hamstrings two times a week, your training program would look like this:

Leg Day 1 and 2: 2 sets of Romanian Deadlift and 2 sets of Hamstring Curls.

Focus on getting 8-15 reps, good quality reps, controlled and with patience: do not rush the process by swinging your body around to lift the weight. Calm your ego if you can't do many reps without cheating, reduce the weight, and perform the exercise correctly.

For people who train bodyweight, exercises such as Nordic curls should help. Seriously, I'm sorry for you guys but unfortunately getting big legs or even an incredible physique through body weight only is rarely achievable. Wait, I'm wrong, it's achievable, after 15 years of training.

Hitting the glutes

Your glutes (the muscles that compose your butt) are already worked a lot by all kinds of compound quadriceps and hamstring exercises however if you really want to grow big glutes, the technique is to train them directly, too.

And to do so, nothing better than a good old hip thrust. Hip thrusts, and leg kickbacks.

In the entire week, you should perform 8-10 sets for glutes. This represents, on an 8-set-per-week program, if you train two times a week, two sets of hip thrusts and two sets of leg kickbacks on days one and two. And this avoids the fact that so many exercises already work heavily on the glutes.

For example, Bulgarian split squats can become a glute-dominant exercise if you practice it by leaning a little bit more forward, chest over knees. By doing so, your glutes will be more engaged.

And trust me, when you do squats with good form and weight that is heavy for your current body weight, you're going to feel your glutes working. Some people feel their glutes are numb after a squat for example. Now they might not have the best form but even with good form it works the glute immensely and trust me you'll feel it if your glutes are working well.

For bodyweight trainers, I suggest hip thrusts, leg kickbacks, and glute bridges all done with bodyweight. Even tho bodyweight isn't the perfect key to a great physique, it still opens some doors, but as always I suggest training with weights.

Hitting the calves

The calves are the muscles at the bottom of the leg. They are worked during your leg-day workout but if you want them to grow effectively I suggest training them directly. This means doing any exercise where you extend your calf by being on your toes: calf raises.

You can do unilateral calf raises, smith machine calf raises, barbell calf raises, and anything with "calf raises" in the name. The goal here is to really feel your calf working. To perform a calf raise, be on your toes and extend your toes as if you are trying to gain a few centimeters. Rinse and repeat for 8-20 reps.

The calves are a stubborn muscle to grow because they're composed mostly, just like the forearms, of slow-twitch muscle fibers. In other words, if you have unfavorable genetics for calves, it's going to be harder to grow them than someone with already genetically gifted calves. Now, it's not because you have bad genetics that you have to give up everything, it's just going to be way, way, way harder to grow them.

Focus on training the calves 2-4 times a week. I suggest training calves 4 times a week, 2 sets each time for a total volume of 8 sets per week of calves.

So for example, on day one you could do barbell calf raises, on day two you could do smith-machine calf raises, on day three you could do leg-press calf raises, and finally on day four you could do smith-machine calf raises.

For bodyweight exercises, simply do calf raises or single-leg calf raises and focus on the stretch.

By the way, the important part of training any muscle group is when you control the weight in the stretched position before exploding up. For example, in a squat, it's controlling when going down and exploding when going up, or at least trying to go up faster than when you go down.

But with calves, you have to exceptionally stretch them and control them so much, it's bewildering. Just focus on the stretch you feel at the bottom of the movement, and repeat the movement again and again. Control your speed very well, even if the movement ends up feeling slow: the goal is to feel the calves burning. Do not go fast, as trust me from experience, going fast will give you 0 results. Absolutely 0. Or very little compared to what you could get from controlling the weight.

Additional work

I recommend adding on your leg-days additional work. Some people like to add adductors or abductor exercises, and if this is your case I suggest training them on an adductor or abductor machine (oftentimes a machine can do both).

Adductors and abductors don't need to be really worked, at least I don't personally work them because I find no utility in doing so. Yes, it can maybe strengthen and help with blah blah tension and pain but to me, it's not a major factor, and considering I'm already working them a lot through other quadriceps exercises it's not a problem.

What I suggest training as additional work tho, are your abdominal muscles, or more commonly called your abs. Exercises such as crunches, leg raises, hanging leg raises, hanging knee raises, russian twists, mountain climbers or even planks should be of great use. Also, using an abs machine can be of great utility to progressively overload more easily.

Should I train my legs once or twice a week?

According to some studies and professional advice from many bodybuilders, training each muscle group twice a week is the "optimal approach". So, training your legs twice a week is apparently the "optimal" way to train your legs compared to once a week. However, what is optimal for one person might not be for another.

Understand that even tho in the gym culture science plays a big role, a lot of times, you should listen to your body. Not out of laziness tho (because I see already some folks cheering up because they finally got the permission to train once a week to avoid the pain of another leg day in the week) but out of factors such as the fatigue it would bring to train two times a week, the time spent, etc.

It's all about individual preferences, and the best training program is the sustainable one. It's better to do a sub-optimal program for 10 years than do an optimal program for 10 months. It might not be smart, but it's better. The goal is to build health first and secondly esthetics.

So focus on your health first, and what actually feels better depending on the amount of rest you have and need, and the results you get from a once-a-week leg-day workout plan or a twice-a-week leg-day workout plan. A lot of factors can come into play whether or not once or twice a week is better for your individual body: diet, sleep, rest days, hormonal systems, age, etc.

But overall, for the vast majority of people, training your legs twice a week is the recommended approach and I think is what is going to help you a lot to build bigger legs in your fitness journey.

CONCLUSION

In my opinion, creating a great leg workout involves training twice a week the four main muscle groups of the leg, the quadriceps, hamstrings, calves, and glutes. Try to also put some abdomen workouts in there and you'll have a complete leg workout that not only you will have created but that will help you to build bigger legs.

Training legs is very hard, the hardest day even because the legs are major muscle groups that require so much energy to work and grow. It's really a hassle, but if you make it easier by having a good training program, you will have already prepared yourself for victory in your goal of achieving bigger legs.

I hope this article was of help to you. In any case, if you have any thoughts about building bigger legs outside of this article, I suggest researching the subject online as there are a ton of exercises and training programs you could try doing.

Thank you very much for reading, and I'll see you next time.

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