Exercise Health Fitness

Building Muscle with Leg Exercises

We have all seen the guy with the huge upper body and tiny little legs. Those people don’t realize that they could have gotten that huge upper body much quicker if they had been doing leg exercises.

When building muscle it is very important that you do leg exercises. The legs make up the majority of muscle in your body and building leg muscle will help your whole body gain muscle.

So how do you overcome a plateau with your bench press? By doing leg workouts! Yes you read that correctly, if you do leg exercises you will get stronger in all areas of your body.

Lets look at some of the best and worst leg workouts.

Good Leg Exercises:
Squats
Lunges
Hamstring Curls
Cleans
Calf Raises

Bad Leg Exercises
Leg Extensions
One leg squats
Deep Squats

You are probably wondering why they have machines for leg extensions if they are so bad. Well, if you do really light weight they are okay and can strengthen your ligaments and tendons. They will also build muscle on the front of your legs. The bad thing is that the human body is not designed to lift a lot of weight in that manner and it should be avoided because it will put unusual strain on your knee.

One leg squats are bad because they put too much pressure on your knee as well as deep squats. The thigh should never be parallel with the ground when doing a squat, that would cause an angle in the knee of way less than 90 degrees and that is not good. When your knee is bent, the amount of weight the knee feels is 7 times the amount of weight above the knee. So if you weight 200 pounds, 150 will be above you knee and that means without any weight on your back your knee is squatting 1,050 pounds!