Improving Leg Size

[Malack101]

Could use some help with leg exercises. My legs are pretty strong but never seem to gain thickness, specifically in the quads.

Can anyone suggest some leg routines?

I've gone heavy on leg press, medium on hack squats (have to watch out for my right knee on that one), varying degrees of leg extensions (heavy, negatives, light weight and fast, etc.) to keep things changing & lunges with weight.

[inflated]

Originally Posted by Malack101

Could use some help with leg exercises. My legs are pretty strong but never seem to gain thickness, specifically in the quads.

Can anyone suggest some leg routines?

I've gone heavy on leg press, medium on hack squats (have to watch out for my right knee on that one), varying degrees of leg extensions (heavy, negatives, light weight and fast, etc.) to keep things changing & lunges with weight.

Regular squats, with impeccable form are the best overall leg and overall body exercise. NO SUBSTITUTES

[Lucas88]

Working legs can be different for some folks...legs are designed for lots of repititious movement, not necessarily or always short, powerful bursts, i.e., walking, running, etc, without resistance. I read somewhere a long time ago in a fitness book or magazine that one way to shake up legs was to bump up the reps and don't go as heavy...it clicked with me and turned out to be the best kind of regular routine for building my legs with NO INJURIES. Any exercise I do for legs now, I do 20-rep sets. That doesn't feed the ego of squatting MASSIVE amounts of weights but when you add up all the pounds I push in one workout, I'm surpassing a lot of my gym buddies that do low reps and HEAVY weights...I've got some big thighs and I can still workout and WALK at my age .

[inm]

Originally Posted by Malack101

Could use some help with leg exercises. My legs are pretty strong but never seem to gain thickness, specifically in the quads.

Can anyone suggest some leg routines?

I've gone heavy on leg press, medium on hack squats (have to watch out for my right knee on that one), varying degrees of leg extensions (heavy, negatives, light weight and fast, etc.) to keep things changing & lunges with weight.

Once you've reached good strength, bodybuilding is not about moving weight, but training the muscle, flexing the muscle against resistance. Concentrate on the muscle you're training (quads), make them do all the work on the leg press, for example (by thinking of straightening your legs with the quads, instead of pushing with the quads, glutes, hams..). Also, work on training density (meaning more work in a given time).

[Djones]

Getting yourself upside down for at least half an hour really helps in gaining leg muscles along with exercises.

[inflated]

Originally Posted by Djones

Getting yourself upside down for at least half an hour really helps in gaining leg muscles along with exercises.

Please explain why and how this would work---I am very skeptical of the pronouncement of being upside down does anything for leg development. Sounds like bad science to me.

[nypup2train]

I sincerely hope Djones answers this, because I am soooooo on the fence about him being just another spambot, given the commercial link in his signature, the lack of any personal data in his profile, and the four one-sentence posts that make up his only participation in the site since he joined.

I'd love to be proven wrong about that, and please don't take offense if you are in fact a Real Live MGS Fan, Djones. Just prove it to us by offering up more than a single sentence explanation, in response to inflated's very reasonable question!

[The Magus]

Other than weights, sprinting and running up hills are good ways to get your cardio in in a way that's leg-friendly...that's why sprinters (nor runners) and (ahem) rugby players have such big legs: short, intense sprints.

[FRNKPBDY]

Squats and leg presses are the best. Be sure to follow proper technique and try doing low reps/sets with heavy weights. This works for me.

[built4superspd]

as many have said:

attention to form.

do squats and deadlifts.
and
do some single leg movements as well as these tandem movements

(ie--forward lunges and reverse lunges with dumbells, bulgarian squats, etc., to recruit stabilizing mm.)
and don't be afraid of including some partial range-of-motion sets to train whatever part of the range of motion is your weakest link (ie, if it's the final phase of deadlifts that limits you, then put the bar on a rack so that it's already halfway up and do several sets starting from that point. this also has the potential to reduce unintended reliance on momentum -- eg, if you do sets of standard deadlifts you may be getting the "bounce" of the weights as they hit the floor to do the work in the first several inches of the next rep).

and remember that if you include some sets with just 1-2 reps at 90+% of your 1RepMax you can address some of the largest neuro-muscular units (these Only get fully recruited at or near max. effort; at lower weight you will be recruiting smaller neuro-muscular units; nothing wrong with that but if that's all you do then those will be the only neuro-muscular units you are hitting.