Single Leg Workouts

Leg training is critical to your overall physical and athletic performance. A good foundation is built from the ground up, and your legs provide the foundation for the rest of your body. When your legs are strong that strength will carry over into your other muscle groups as well. Making you bigger and stronger all over.

A big mistake that a lot of newbie lifters make is that they only focus on the “Show Off Muscles” of the chest, arms, and abs. The main muscles you see when you take your shirt off and look in the mirror. Have you ever done this before?

I admit that as a teenager my early workouts consisted of nothing more than push ups and curls. I can remember curling those plastic cement filled York Dumbbells in my bedroom before school each morning. Hoping and praying that I would be huge and jacked by the end of the school year. Those were the good ole’ days before the Internet when life seemed so much simpler 😉

I sincerely hope that you have advanced beyond the stage of simply doing a chest and arm workout, and instead view your body as a whole unit that needs to be worked from top to bottom. If not, then now would be a good time to start training legs!

Developing Symmetry With Single Limb Training…

The first step to a great physique is simply training all your major muscle groups equally and developing proportion from top to bottom, like we just mentioned. But beyond that you can step things up and strive to develop symmetry from left to right. When it comes to upper body exercises most people do this to a certain degree without even consciously thinking about it. Whenever you grab a pair of dumbbells for an exercise you are working each side equally. Dumbbells automatically force each arm to handle an equal workload. But with barbells and machines it’s not always the case, a lot of the time you’ll unconsciously lift more of the load with your dominant side. For example, have you ever noticed when doing a max effort barbell bench press that one side sometimes locks out before the other?

With the majority of leg training workouts people tend to use barbells (i.e. squats & deadlifts) and machines (i.e. leg extension, leg curl, leg press, etc.) and this often leads to one leg getting more developed than the other without you even realizing it.

However, once you start to incorporate single leg training in your workouts this will create a whole new awareness of muscle activity in your lower body. Not only will you feel your legs working like they have never worked before. But you’ll probably also discover some imbalances between your leg and right legs that you never knew existed.

In the videos below you’ll get some good single leg exercises that you can start incorporating into your own leg workouts to help develop balance and proportion between your left and right legs.

Give these single leg training tips a try in your next leg workout. And if you have any questions or comments, feel free to post them below and I’ll chat with you in the comments section.