The Importance of Leg Training


The Importance of Leg Training

The muscles of the upper leg are the largest and most powerful in the entire body. There is only a few movements in sports that do not involve intense leg effort. A golfer, baseball player, discus thrower, shot putter and boxer all begin their respective movements with a powerful leg drive. In weightlifting, most power moves like power cleans, clean and press, and deadlifts involve a lot of leg effort, as do the lifts used in Olympic weightlifting competition.

However, there is no sport in which leg development is as important as in bodybuilding. While contest judges have the shoulders, chest, arms, back, and abs to occupy their attention above a bodybuilder's waist, when they look at the lower body the single most compelling visual element is the thighs - the quadriceps and the hamstrings. Legs are the most massive muscle group in the body and proportionately constitute almost half of your physique.

Leg strength is the foundation of athletic excellence and that weight training is the best way to develop that strength. Leg muscles have another quality besides great strength - they are capable of great endurance. Capable of moving up to a ton of weight, the legs are also designed to carry you long distances without tiring. A person in good condition can walk for weeks through rugged terrain and run for 100 miles. No other muscles of the body can deliver this dual quality of great strength and great endurance.

This is why training the legs for bodybuilding is so demanding. It isn't enough just to subject the legs to heavy overload. You have to use heavy weights and sufficient volume of training that you stress the fibers involved and exhaust the endurance capacity of the leg muscles. Doing 5 sets of barbell curls for the biceps can be demanding, but doing 5 sets of heavy squats with 400 or 500 pounds on your shoulders is more like running a mini-marathon, with that kind of total exhaustion squeezed in 8 or 9 minutes of concentrated effort.

Like many young bodybuilders, we had a tendency to train our upper body harder than our legs muscles. Luckily, we realized in time how important leg muscle group is to a championship physique, and we should began to indulge in superhuman squats and other leg exercises to build up our thighs muscle mass.

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