Legs
Yes, legs, probably sounds alien to most of our male lifters. Calves, another word completely unheard of within our iron brethren.
Why are legs extremely unimpressive of the average gym rat ?
Although I can point out a list of theories behind this, I’ll stick to a few obvious ones.
If a guy needed huge calves as much as he wanted big biceps, he would have them. Legs are viewed as probably the most boring muscle group any guy works on, the idea itself is dreadful. And that mindset is the reason behind lagging development. Think of how pumped up you are to train your chest, or your arms, that mindset steers your growth. If you look at legs like you are looking at a chore, you will never build impressive legs.
But keep in mind, we have limited time during a week, when we choose to build different aspects of our body, we have to sacrifice some on another end. For a man, the upper body is the most impressive from my lens (the biasness strikes again), but that does not mean you completely forget your legs ! That’s half of your body !!
The basic squats, leg extensions and curls will help you build the mass you seek, trust me, before you think about sculpting, get the mass in by building your strength in the first few years. There is a huge debate behind how legs should be trained to begin with ! Some train it once a week, some twice a week, some once in 2 weeks. From all these years of lifting and training, I’ll tell you something, your frequency of training, will depend on you, and your context, your genetics are different, your life is different, keeping everything else constant, a doctor and a teacher of the same gender would not most probably have the same recovery capacity, you have to understand how your body works.
If you are a beginner with a controlled rather not too hectic lifestyle, these 5 exercises would be more than enough for you for a long time. BB Squats, Leg Press, Leg Extension, Leg Curls, and calf raises. Train twice a week, if you use these right, you can build some seriously impressive legs within a few years. I gained some proper quad separation by merely intensifying workouts using these basic exercises !
Some basic steps of changing the game would also involve changing foot positions from time to time. And most guys need to work on their glutes directly, that’s right start with the barbell hipthrusts.
Your strength would correlate to more gains, so keep building the strength, month by month.
Once you get advanced, you can start testing out different concepts.
I used to hammer legs twice a week with raw intensity, but I was not creative with my exercise selection. I should have added more glute work, lateral variations, and more compound movements for my hams. Try out lunges, split squats, Romanian deadlifts, barbell hipthrusts, thrusters and so on if you have a few years of experience under your wing.
And calves ? Don’t think 3 sets of calf raises will build a muscle that has an amazing endurance capacity and also the ability to exert a significant force !
Hope gave you some sense of direction.
Next time you complain about a lagging muscle group. Ask yourself, did you really want to train it ?
If you did, you wouldn’t ask this question, I did natural bodybuilding since I was a kid, there’s no plateau, there’s only patience missing in you.
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