The Workout Plan

In last week’s How to Train Legs Part I, I talked about the reasons why you should train your legs hard and hopefully helped you to establish some new goals for leg training. Today, I outline a workout to achieve those goals.

How to Sprint

Choose an exercise like running, cycling, stairs, swimming, or whatever else you feel most comfortable with. The only caveat is that it must be an exercise that can accommodate 100% maximal effort (no walking!).

Using running as a reference point, this will help you determine intensity:

• Low intensity is like walking briskly.
• Medium intensity is like a sustainable jog.
• High intensity is like an all-out max effort sprint.

Now perform the sprints using the following duration/intensity scheme:

Duration Intensity
120 sec                Low
60 sec                Medium
120 sec                Low
30 sec                High
120 sec                Medium
30 sec                High
120 sec                Low
30 sec                High
120 sec                Medium
30 sec                High
120 sec                Low
60 sec                Medium
120 sec                Low

In order to gauge progress over time, you can try to:

• Increase sprint duration.
• Decrease rest periods to 90 seconds, then to 60 seconds.
• Increase the number of high intensity sprints in a session.

Training Goals

Split
We want to execute three full-body workouts each week, so that we can hit the legs hard every other day.

Sets
Execute from one to three warm-up sets and five work sets for the first exercise of the day. Follow this with three sets of each subsequent exercise.

Reps

• For strength gains, 5 reps for men, 7 reps for women.
• For muscle gains, 10 reps for men, 12 reps for women.
• For endurance gains, 15 reps for men, 20 reps for women.

Weight
Choose one weight and stick with it for the duration of the exercise. If you complete all of your required reps for all of your required sets, increase the weight by at least five pounds for your next workout.

Full Body Routine
Workout 1:

• 5 sets of squats
• 3 sets of rows
• 3 sets of good mornings / stiff leg deadlifts
• 3 sets of dumbbell bench press
• 3 sets of abs

Workout 2:

• 5 sets of deadlifts
• 3 sets of incline barbell bench
• 3 sets of alternating lunges holding dumbbells
• 3 sets of pull ups / pull downs
• 3 sets focusing on lower abs

Workout 3:

• Include a 20 minute session of interval sprints at the beginning of your training.
• 3 sets of any chest press
• 3 sets of any row or pull up / pull down
• 3 sets of shoulder presses
• 3 sets of dips super set with 3 sets of dumbbell curls
• 3 sets of abs

Recovery

• After each workout you should be stretching for no less than 10 minutes.
• Drink a post-workout drink within 20 minutes of finishing your workout.
• Drink 64 ounces of water every day.
• Sleep for 7-8 hours every night.
• Eat 3 solid meals and 3 smaller snacks every day.

If you must do extra cardio, I recommend doing low-intensity cardio at the opposite end of the day from your weight training or immediately after your training session, then take the following day off completely.

Stick to this program for eight weeks and let us know your results.

Post from: Diets in Review Blog

How to Train Legs, Part II

The Missing Link

With average gym goers primarily concerned with the development of their upper body, many weight lifters forget or just neglect to train their legs. This becomes a problem with both men and women who are focusing on either building muscle or losing fat.

For men this is a problem because they are often focused on total body functional strength, or aesthetic symmetry and muscle size. For women this is a problem because they often spend too much time on endurance cardio, and end up missing the huge metabolic potential of leg training.

In order to properly integrate leg training into our routine, we need to know why, how, and when to train those wheels.

Why Train Your Legs

Your legs are the largest group of muscles in your body. By training your legs hard, you will be setting yourself up to realize the most overall strength and fat loss gains when compared to all other muscle groups.

Strong legs will allow you to:

• Pick up anything heavy off the floor or ground.

• Form the foundation of your body’s core strength chain.

• Strengthen your lower back to protect from injury.

• Lift the most weight of all muscle groups.

• Burn the most calories of all muscle groups.

• Stimulate the highest growth hormone release through training.

Think of it this way: the potential growth of any one muscle group will be directly impacted by the conditioning of the muscles in the rest of the body. Moreover, muscular imbalance in the legs could inevitably lead to injury, asymmetry, upper body over-training, and the dreaded nickname “Chicken Legs”.

Some Examples of Leg Training Goals

The best way to approach an overhaul of your workout program is to set up a series of goals for your new training plan. This will give you a focus and a method to qualify your results.

Some leg training goals might include:

• Increase overall leg, lower back, and core strength.

• Condition your cardiovascular system with high rep squats and sprints.

• Add size and girth to the legs through strength and hypertrophy training.

• Practicing and perfecting your form for these demanding compound exercises.

• Improve sprint times.

• Burn fat through the increased metabolic demands of lower body strength training.

How to Train Your Legs

The squat is arguably the best exercise that any athlete can perform. Overhead press, bench press, and deadlifts rank right up there too. Sprinting, specifically in conjunction with high intensity interval training (HIIT), is considered the most effective form of cardiovascular work.

When we train our legs with resistance training, we will be focusing on the following compound exercises:

• Squats to work our quads. Squats are #1 on the list of the 5 best leg exercises for the quads.

• Deadlifts to work our hamstrings. Deadlifts are #1 on the list of the 5 best hamstring exercises.

• Good mornings to work our glutes and lower back.

• Lunges to work our legs in a unilateral range of motion.

• Interval sprints for explosive strength and cardiovascular conditioning.

Please return for part 2 of this article Friday 2/13, when you will learn how to construct a HIIT session for sprinting and how to implement an eight-week training program to bring your lower body conditioning up to speed.

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Post from: Diets in Review Blog

How to Train Legs, Part I