Top Six Reasons To Prioritize Leg Day

Skipping your leg workout is one of the biggest strength training mistakes you can make. The muscles in your lower body make up the largest muscles in the body and allow you to navigate your world with ease. If you prioritize leg day, you build the muscles that drive metabolic rate and support a high quality of life. Here are several reasons to prioritize leg day:

#1: Protect Against Belly Fat

Low muscle mass in the legs means you’ll have more belly fat. Muscle is the primary consumer of glucose, or sugar, in the blood, meaning that it allows your body to use the carbs you eat instead of storing them as fat.

#2: Increase Longevity

Weak legs are associated with increased risk of mortality. A 2005 study found a close association between the degree of strength in the quadriceps and risk of dying in elderly men and women over a 6-year period. Conversely, subjects with the strongest legs had the least risk of dying.

#3: Improve Mobility

A weak lower body leads to poor posture and faulty movement patterns. Lack of leg training leads to muscle imbalances and tightness due to long periods spent sitting.

#4: Protect Against Cancer & Other Diseases

Low muscle mass in the lower body is linked with increased risk of disease. This may be because muscle improves insulin sensitivity and has an anti-inflammatory effect throughout the body.

#5: Avoid Low Back & Knee Pain

A weak lower body makes you more vulnerable to develop knee and low back pain. Low back pain is often a result of tight hip flexors and weakness in the posterior and core musculature, both of which are targeted with lower body exercises.

#6: Improve Brain Function

By prioritizing leg day, you improve brain function. In one study, researchers found that exercises that engage the large muscles in the legs trigger the production of stem cells in the brain. Generation of stem cells helps the brain to renew itself, and lower body activity also improves oxygen and blood flow to the brain, which are key for cognition.

What Lower Body Exercises Should You Be Doing?

There’s no end to great exercises you can use to train the lower body. The key when training legs is to ensure the following:

You target both the muscles in both the front and back of the body.

It used to be that leg training tended to be quad or front of the body dominant. With the surge in popularity of glute training, this has shifted somewhat, but similar problems arise when you focus too much on one part of the body. Instead of spending time isolating specific parts of the body, focus on balance throughout the lower body with multi-joint training (squats, deadlifts).

You train balance on the right and left sides of the body.

Unilateral training helps overcome the natural asymmetry that plagues us, increasing risk of pain and injury. Step-ups, lunges, single-leg deadlifts, and split squats will improve structural balance in the lower body.

You train core exercises to build up your center of power.

Back extensions, reverse hypers, glute-ham raises, and good mornings may not be your typical “core” lifts but they will do more for improving overall strength and function than sit ups or crunches and they hit key muscles in the lower body.

You include exercises that overcome natural weaknesses, such as quad dominance.

Posterior-chain focused lifts (hamstring curls, back extensions, calf raises) can help improve balance throughout the body.

Final Words:

By ramping up your lower body workouts you should be well on your way to achieving peak levels of fitness and wellness for a longer, activity-filled life.