Ultimate Guide To At Home Leg Workouts

There are many benefits to training your lower body and this can be done at home as well as at the gym.
If you don’t have access to machines, you can perform your exercises with body weight, dumbbells, kettlebells and or bands.
When these home alternatives are performed correctly, they are very effective at building strength in your lower body.

We understand that training from home is not only convenient but can also save you money. This is why we created our app and provide home workouts with progression just the same as we would for our gym users.
Training from home allows you the flexibility to fit your workouts in on your own schedule and in the comfort of your own home.

There are many exercises that can be performed without equipment. Often these are the same exercises we perform in the gym as well.
For example, squats, lunges, glute bridges and hip thrusts, calf raises, reverse hypers and step ups.

Bodyweight Squat –
1. Stand with feet slightly wider than hip width apart
2. Toes pointed slightly outwards
3. Squat down, pushing knees out in same direction as toes
4. Squat as deep as your mobility allows
5. Maintain neutral spine throughout

Bodyweight Walking Lunge –
1. Looking straight ahead
2. Step forward and then lunge by bending both knees to roughly 90 degrees
3. Push up, back into the start position and repeat
4. Keep your chest up throughout

Bodyweight Step Up –
1. Place one foot up onto your platform and utilize the muscles of your quads and glutes to drive upwards into a standing position. Bring both feet together to meet at the top.
2. Slowly step back down to the floor one leg at a time and alternate leading legs for each rep
3. Keep chest up throughout entire movement

After some time you might find bodyweight exercises to be less challenging as your muscles adapt and get stronger.
To increase the intensity of these exercises, you can start to add things like dumbbells or resistance bands.
Performing the same exercises as above whilst holding dumbbells in one or both hands will be a new stimulus that will make the exercise feel more difficult whilst enabling your muscles to continuously grow. Werecommend starting with light dumbbells and allowing room for progression to increase weight in coming weeks, months.

There are many variations of the hip thrust, some mentioned earlier such as using weight, pauses, pulse reps or bands.
You can also experiment with single leg hip thrust and b-stance hip thrusts.

Here is an example of a lower body workout using dumbbells:

A. Dumbbell Goblet Squat – 4 x 8 reps
B1. Dumbbell Hamstring Curl – 4 x 10 reps
B2. Dumbbell Glute Bridge – 4 x 10 reps
C1. Dumbbell Walking Lunges – 4 x 8 reps each leg
C2. Dumbbell Leg Extension – 4 x 10 reps
D. Dumbbell Single Leg Standing Calf Raise – 3 x 8 reps each leg

The way we would increase intensity for more advanced lifters who are training at home can be done in a number of ways.
Such as: increasing the weight of the dumbbell, adding training variation such as tempo, pauses, 1 & ¼ reps or increasing the reps and sets.

It is important to consider structural balance and follow a well rounded program even when training at home with bodyweight or light equipment. This is to ensure development of the muscles in the lower body are balanced for both strength, functionally and aesthetics.
We write all of our training programs, available for you on Base Body – The App with this in mind.
A good example of this is if we are starting our session with a quad dominant movement such as a high bar squat, we would pair this with a hamstring curl to equally target the hamstrings.

We like to train lower body 3 days a week and do this by having a squat, deadlift and hip thrust focused session.

Within these workouts we will cover all areas of the lower body, quads, glutes, hamstrings and calves using a variety of exercises.
This is to ensure we are getting the most out of our strength, leaving enough time for muscle recovery and not skipping our accessories which are vital in a well rounded lower body.
In between these 3 lower body days, we will perform our 2 upper body sessions.

An example of a training split is push/pull/legs.
This is where you have 3 sessions a week, one training all the muscles or the lower body and 2 upper body sessions, one focusing on pulling patterns and one focusing on pushing patterns.

You can also repeat this workout again within the week, turning it into 6 sessions.

The lower body works quite hard on this training split however has ample time for recovery and is ready to go again the following week or leg session.

Warm ups and activations are particularly important in making leg workouts effective.
This is to ensure the muscles are switched on prime for the heavy lifting to follow.

We like to start small with activations and then perform warm sets of our lifts or machine work before getting to our working weight. This is so we can both physically and mentally engage in the session, understand the loads and see how our body is responding to the session.

Using Base Body – The App is a great way to track your progress. Each session you will be able to record your weights, reps and sets which saves under your account so you can always review previous workouts and see how far you have come!

We love our community to keep us motivated however rely on discipline to continue to show up each day, put our best foot forward and continue to progress with our training.

Keeping a journal or photo log of your workouts is a great tool to stay consistent. Scheduling your sessions in advance and also training with friends to keep one another accountable.

We encourage our babes to jump on Base Body – The App and give our training programs a go with a 7 day free trial. See for yourself just how strong, confident and empowered you can become.
We take the guesswork out of what to do so all you need is commit to bettering yourself, show up and start training. Be a part of our exclusive female only strength community, Base Body Babes VIP.