Often when you’re exercising, you’ll read or hear about people doing upper-body workouts (or “arm day”) and lower-body workouts (a.k.a. “leg day). Workouts where you split upper and lower body workouts between different days let you focus on one set of muscles while the others rest.
Today, we’ll focus on lower-body workouts (we covered upper-body workouts in a previous post). These workouts focus on all the muscles below your waist, including glutes, quads, calves, and hamstrings.
Benefits of Lower-Body Workouts
I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone say they enjoyed “leg day,” but lower-body strength workouts have a variety of benefits. The muscles in the lower body provide a foundation for the rest of your body. Strong lower body muscles support a wide range of sports activities as well as functional, everyday movements.
Like all strength training, working your lower body can help improve bone density and overall health. It also helps improve balance and makes everyday activities like climbing stairs and lifting things easier. Strengthening the muscles around your hip, knee, and ankle joints also helps prevent injury.
Working your lower body can also help strengthen your core (especially exercise where you work one leg at a time). In addition, strong muscles in the foundation of your body help support good posture and can relieve lower back pain.
Good Lower-Body Exercises
There’s a wide variety of lower-body workouts you can try. These exercises will target the quads, calves, hamstrings, glutes, or a combination of those muscles. Lower body exercises include:
- Barbell hip thrust
- Box step ups
- Deadlifts
- Glute bridges
- Leg curls
- Leg press
- Lunges
- Squats (click here for more info)
As usual, it’s a good idea to do some dynamic stretches to warm up your body and raise your heart rate before doing weighted workouts. Examples include jumping jacks, body weight squats, jump lunges, and leg swings.
Hit the Gym!
Going to the gym isn’t a requirement for working out your lower body, but it can be a big help. Here at Extreme Studio Performance, we have the weights you’ll need for a full lower-body workout as well as exercise machines to support your workouts. You can, for example, use a leg press machine to work your quads and glutes, a leg curl machine to target your hamstrings, or a hack squat machine to hit all the major muscles.
Doing your workout at a gym can also help with motivation. And if you join a group class or work with a personal trainer, it helps prevent injury. Being at a gym also means you can ask the staff if you have any questions about how to use a new exercise machine. Contact us to set up a free gym tour and fitness evaluation, and see how Extreme Studio Performance can help support your fitness journey.