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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