New to strength training? Coach Kevin Don breaks down the principles of strength training your legs.
Whether you want to be able to have more sure footing on uneven terrain, play games with your children or grandchildren, hit the golf course with your friends, or just have legs that would make a rhino jealous, let's have a look at the best way to strength train your legs!
Get-Fit Guy is hosted by Kevin Don. A transcript is available at Simplecast.
Have a fitness question? Email Kevin at getfitguy@quickanddirtytips.com or leave us a voicemail at (510) 353-3014.
Find Get-Fit Guy on Facebook and Twitter, or subscribe to the newsletter for more fitness tips.
Get-Fit Guy is a part of Quick and Dirty Tips.
Links:
https://www.quickanddirtytips.com
https://www.facebook.com/GetFitGuy
https://twitter.com/GetFitGuy
https://www.kevindon.com/
Hi, I'm Kevin Don, the Get-Fit Guy, and I'm here to share my accumulated decade of knowledge in the strength and conditioning industry with you to help you become the best version of yourself!
Legs… pretty important aren't they? Certainly when we consider that humans are upright bipeds. The legs support and locomote. They propel us forwards, backwards, push us sideways and allow us to stand in a queue. They handily bend in the middle, allowing us to sit down to rest and perform critical bodily functions, such as evacuation.
As we age, like every part of us, our legs are subject to entropic processes and undergo losses of muscle mass and bone mineral density. In my own family, my father has gotten to the age that he starts to lose his footing and can't recover the situation or slips and can't get up again. Which is crazy considering he was a powerlifting champion! But he is of the generation that is of the mindset that lifting weights is bad for the elderly and also of the generation where, of course, he won't listen to a “child” telling him what is best!
Now, whether you want to be able to have more sure footing on uneven terrain, play games with your children or grandchildren, hit the golf course with your friends, or just have legs that would make a rhino jealous, let's have a look at the best way to strength train your legs and make that happen!
Previously on the podcast, I have spoken about a strength hierarchy, which, in case you don't remember, is:
What this means really is you have to be able to:
So, if you want to get strong legs, the first thing is to create an approach that would help you make the shape required. That means actions like your bending pattern or your upper push and pull. So we want to focus on the ability to perform knee bends in both the squat pattern and the lunge pattern, as both are crucial to everyday movements Walking and running are lunge patterns and sitting down is a squat pattern.
So, what exactly is the shape required?
You are able to bend at the hips and knees simultaneously. It's very common due to our sedentary lives and office-based work where we sit most of the day that many of us lack the ability to make this pattern. Most commonly I see knees bending first. This leads to the heels lifting off the floor as we approach the bottom of the squat, which, of course, is unstable.
Whilst you perform the squat (or lunge) the knee stays tracking over the middle of the foot, with a vertical shin. If the knee drifts inwards, that is called knee valgus and has been positively correlated with knee injury. It's more common in women because of the shape of the pelvis causing more of an angle of the thigh bone (the femur) from hip to knee. It's called the “angle of Q.”
Similarly, it's important that we have a strong core and be able to hold our torso in a fixed position as we move, because once we add load, we will find that a deformable lever (the torso being the lever here) is a poor transmitter of force.
We always want to squat as deep as we can while maintaining the above. Deep squats are NOT bad for the knees if they track centrally. Strength is gained in the range it's trained. If you do shallow squats, you won't ever be strong in a deep position. (You might remember the SAID principles we have covered in the past, defining specificity).
We should always be aiming to squat in free space with a load we have to control independently. This is because it mimics reality much better than a machine, which keeps us in a fixed range of motion. When we squat in free space, we have to use so many other muscles to control things like balance, which we get away with on a machine.
I would recommend bearing in mind that machines were never invented to keep you safe, they were created to make gyms more profitable. The first machines had the purpose of allowing gyms to operate with little to no staff, because now, for the first time, no one needed to be taught how to use a barbell. This happened in the 1970s with a huge marketing push by Nautilus, although several small independents had made machines earlier than this. The free weight is KING for all outcomes if one is injury-free and able.
Now that we have covered some brief technical points, we need to talk about how to build capacity. It’s a fact that the biggest predictor we have of potential for force output is the cross-sectional diameter of a muscle. In most cases, a bigger muscle can create more force than a smaller one. So, at some point, we want to increase muscular size, because this will lead to better strength outcomes. It is generally accepted that more “time under tension” will grow your muscles better than a small number of fast reps. So, we should focus on slow reps (we call this tempo training) and this has 4 phases:
As a coach, I might write a squat for a client as 32X2, this would mean, 3 seconds to squat down, 2 seconds pause at the bottom, with X meaning explosive, so stand it up as quickly as possible, and finally, a 2-second pause at the top to reset and get ready for the next rep.
Our goal is to get stronger, but also to be able to have some capacity for life (long walks, golf, etc.). If we do really heavy singles, we won't have any work capacity, and if we do sets of 20, it won't allow us to use enough load to get stronger. So usually, unless you’re training for a specific athletic goal, I would use sets of 5. This is a sweet spot between strength and capacity.
We want to make sure we are getting stronger, so we have to increase the load (stress) each time to make sure we have a dose-response. So I might say to a client one week that they will perform 3-5 sets of 5 reps at 32X2 with 2-3 min rest between sets at 95lbs, and then the following week, everything will remain the same except for the load, which will increase by 5lbs. We may see a client be able to increase by 25lbs, but we should always hold this back, because our ligaments and tendons don't adapt as quickly as our muscles and are always lagging behind and this may result in an injury to a tendon by progressing too quickly.
Now, this method (linear progression) will eventually stop working when all the novice gains have run out because you have picked all the low-hanging fruit. That is when you may start to add greater complexity of movement and program design (see episode 594).
So that's it, Kevin? I just hit the gym and do 5x5 squats and leave? Well, NO. It's important for us to identify weaknesses and become more well-rounded. Some of us may have weak ankles or flat arches on our feet, causing our knees to collapse on the squat. Some may have a knee collapse caused by weak glutes. We may see hips lifting too early because of weak hip extension and trying to use the quads more. These are all things we want to address. But those are topics for another episode! So make sure to tune in next week when I will cover how to assess your squat pattern by common errors and talk about some “fixes” you may want to try!
Squatobots ROLL OUT! (That's me showing my age with a transformers joke).