Guide To Effective Leg Day Workouts

Working out your lower body is important to develop strength, structural balance and overall fitness. 

You can train the muscles in your lower body with weights in the gym or with a combination of weights and bodyweight exercises at home. 

We love training the lower body for strength and aesthetics and like to follow a 60:40 ratio of lower to upper body.

The benefits of strength training are endless. It increases muscularity, improves balance and coordination, general fitness and overall well being.
Safely training with resistance is great for your joint health and bone density. It also helps to reduce stress and improve mental clarity.
Leg strength is important for daily activity, the quads, hamstrings, calves and glutes are used every day when, sitting, walking, running, lifting and moving things. Strengthening these muscles only improves your ability to perform daily tasks and helps keep the body strong as we age.

Some of our favorite lower body exercises include the squat, leg press and leg extension.
Utilizing these pieces of equipment allow us to target certain muscles of the lower body, either in compound or isolation.
It also allows us to change the volume, load and intensity and keeps training varied and challenging for your enjoyment as well as functional and aesthetic purposes.
The squat can be performed in a number of ways, however the two most common are the High Bar and the Low Bar Back Squat.
We generally like to rotate these 2 types of squats from program to program depending on the training goal.
The squat is a full body movement although it is most effective in working the muscles of the lower body, the quads, hamstrings and glutes.
The leg press also works these 3 as well as the calf muscles. Depending on your foot position, you can target your quads, glutes or hamstrings more which makes the leg press very versatile.
If you are following a structured program, not only will you have strength improvements, you will also see muscularity increase.

There are a number of ways you can train your lower body even if you don’t have access to a gym or have minimal equipment at home.
For example the squat can be performed body weight, with a dumbbell or kettlebell and even with resistance bands.
You can perform a leg extension by sitting on a chair or bench, holding a dumbbell between your feet and extending your legs straight out in front of you, the same way you would on a machine.
A banded or dumbbell hamstring curl is also a great alternative when you don’t have machinery.
A few others to perform at home with minimal to no equipment are lunges, glute bridges or a hip thrust, lunges either walking or stationary. The options are endless! If you do not have weight to add overtime to make these exercises more challenging, you can utilize pauses, pulse reps and 1 & ¼ reps.

Here is an example of one of our lower body focussed workouts with a little bit of conditioning from Base Body – The App!

A1. Low Bar Back Squat – 4 x 6 reps
A2. Walking Lunge – 4 x 12 reps
B1. Barbell RDL – 3 x 12 reps
B2. Leg Extension – 3 x 12 reps
C1. Sled Push – 3 x 30 seconds
C2. Mountain Climbers – 3 x 30 seconds

We would recommend following this program for 4 weeks, each week increasing the load lifted or number of reps performed.

We recommend starting with our Zero to Barbell program. This will teach you how to lift correctly and learn the right movement patterns before adding load.
For example, learning to squat with a counter balance weight, before progressing to a heavier dumbbell and performing goblet squats and then eventually moving on to a light barbell for a back squat variation.
Stationary lunges, glute bridges and light machine work are also great for beginners learning to move.
Focusing on form and gradual progression is the priority when starting out. With a good foundation, you will be able to increase load more efficiently and will be far less likely to injure yourself.

With our most advanced lifters, we challenge the body not only through lifting heavier loads over time but also tempo and variation in reps and sets.
Such as we like to incorporate rotary programs, where we perform 6 sets of 5, 3, 1, 5, 3, 1 reps on our compound movements.
We incorporate slow eccentrics and pause reps. This puts new stimulus on the muscles and allows for growth and strength development.
Alternating training phases between strength and hypertrophy is the simple overview or the routine we like to follow.
Although we can make things more advanced for those with more training experience, the basics will always be done and incorporated into our workouts.
You can see examples of this on Base Body – The App with a 7 day free trial.

We always start our workouts with activations followed by our warm up sets.
This is to ensure our bodies and minds are primed for our working sets.
Activating and switching on the muscles prior to your session help to not only improve your lifting ability but avoid injury.
Our 3 staple routines are our core, glute and shoulder activations. You can find them here!
Glute Activation
Core Activation
Shoulder Activation

Nutrition plays an important role in fueling your body for your sessions, aiding in recovery and building muscle.
Eating enough protein is key in building and repairing muscle. We should be aiming for roughly 1.8-2g of protein per kg of body weight every day.
Ensuring you stay hydrated is also vital to your recovery. We aim for 2L of water per day.

It is common that people can neglect structural balance when training.
Such as focusing only on developing or building your quads and failing to train your hamstrings and glutes or vice versa.
Not only will this impact structural balance but you will notice pitfalls in other areas of your training.
We like to start our workouts with the most important/biggest compound lift of the day, for example a High Bar Back Squat. As this is a more quad and knee dominant movement, we then like to include hip and hamstring dominant movements in our accessories. This can be in the form of a hamstring curl or a back extension for example.
It is also common to perform weight lifting with improper technique.
This will not only impact how much weight you can lift, but it will also compromise the health and safety of your body which is our biggest priority,
A lack of variation across a program is also a common mistake to try and avoid. Alternating between a high bar and a low bar back squat will have positive impacts on both of those lifts as opposed to only ever training in one of those patterns. This could lead to over training, lack of recovery and plateaus.

For more fitness tips and workout inspiration, head over to our social pages! You can find us on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok.

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