Why you should not Skip Leg Day

Women and respectable men of the exercise center, now is the right time to discuss leg day. While alleged "mirror muscles" like your center, back and arms are ordinarily more perceptible, you're committing an immense error if you're preparing over the belt. Your lower body is home to a portion of the greatest muscles in your body. Concentrate on workouts that test your base half and you'll be remunerated with solid glutes, athletic quads, sound hammies and conditioned calves. However its not about looking great. As confirmation,

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Why you MUST do SQUATS ! Seriously Read on.

Notwithstanding men not being permitted to snort, an alternate developing pattern that could likewise be put in the weight room "pussification" classification is the Smith machine squat. Weightlifting was established on free weights! So why do meat heads do Smith machine squats? They are less demanding than free-weight squats, and the quantity of strands enacted in a free-weight squat is more than in a Smith machine squat.

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BUILD BIG MUSCULAR LEGS

Oh the leg day, the most dreaded day in gym for most people. And the sole reason we now have this chicken leg syndrome among bodybuilders.
 
Some guys just want to have trimmed upper bodies and still be able to fit in their skinny jean, and some guys believe that you shouldn’t train legs if you want to have the ultimate V taper.
 
So what are those guys?

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BOOST YOUR BENCH PRESS, SQUAT, AND DEAD-LIFT

Mastering the three basic lifts is essential for building an awesome body. Learning these variations can turn awesome to amazing.

When it comes to building muscle and strength, three exercises can kick sand in the face of pretty much any other move out there. I'm talking about "the big three" for getting big: the squat, bench press, and deadlift.

Unfortunately, performing these exercises endlessly can lead to stagnation—

mental and physical—and once your brain hits the exit, your gains are likely to go on hiatus, too.

Sure, you could ditch these exercises for a while and embark on an entirely new program to shake things up, but these are awesome moves and gym staples for good reason.

So, I have plan that can give you the best of both worlds: the gains these exercises undeniably and inevitably produce, but enough variety to hold your interest, too. Try these variations after your basic sets for the big three exercises. It's as simple as that—and the resulting gains will amaze you.

The muscle-making and strength-building magic happens in three basic ways:

• You do more work than before, which leads to progress.
• Your body adapts neurologically, which leads to even more progress.
• Your work on the variations will improve your technique on the originals.

Check out these variations for each of the big three lifts, and learn how you can implement them to elevate your training and improve your physique!

1

 DEADLIFT VARIATIONS

Complete your planned rep and weight scheme of deadlifts, and then try one of the following variations:

DEFICIT DEADLIFTS

This variation is for more advanced lifters and is designed to help increase the range of motion. Basically, elevate your feet 1-2 inches off the ground and pull from there. You can stand on top of 45-pound plates, use hard mats, or a short box.

DEFICIT DEADLIFT

When performing the deficit deadlift, I recommend dropping the weight by 10-20 percent. The set and rep scheme would be identical to that of your deadlift off the ground.

ROMANIAN DEADLIFTS

Drop the weight 10-20 percent and perform 3-5 additional sets of 3-8 repetitions.

BLOCK PULLS

Blocks pulls are not to be confused with rack pulls, which use the power rack. Placing the bar on the pins of a power rack takes any slack out of the bar and changes the lift drastically.

For a block pull, simply elevate the plates 1-4 inches off the ground by using mats, blocks, or even other 45-pound plates. Then either use the same weight as you did on your last set or add up to 10 percent to the bar.

Complete another few sets at the same number of repetitions you used for deadlift.

2

 SQUAT VARIATIONS

Similarly, after crushing your regularly scheduled squats, you could work in one of these variations for getting out of particularly troublesome sticking points:

PAUSE SQUATS

"BRUTAL IS ONE WAY TO DESCRIBE THE PAUSE SQUAT."

Brutal is one way to describe the pause squat. Brutally effective, that is. A pause squat is just as it sounds: an ever-so-slight pause at the bottom, then bounce right back up.

I recommend dropping the bar weight by 10-20 percent and performing a few more sets at the same rep range this way. One to three seconds at the bottom more than suffices.

The paused position should be where you actively hold the weight up, not in the fully rested position. If you drop to the verybottom, you'd most likely engage the end range of your joints to create stability, but not so much your muscles to create the much preferred "active" stability.

PIN SQUATS

Try squatting from the pins. The pins change the nature of the exercise by removing the lowering (eccentric) portion. To set these up, move the safety pins in your squat rack so they hold the bar in a position where you are at or about 1-2 inches above parallel.

With the pins set and the bar loaded, dip yourself under the bar and into a proper position to squat the weight up. Maintain the same bar weight as you did for reps—keeping between 60-80 percent effort—except now perform only single reps.

3

 BENCH PRESS VARIATIONS

The bench press is a gym standard, but a few key variations can help push you past sticking points, should they arise. If you're keen on improving your bench press, try using one of the following:

FLOOR PRESS

Essentially a bench press from the ground, the floor press doesn't make the bench press any easier. Quite the opposite! The nature of the position nearly eliminates the drive of your legs and the arch of your back. The upshot is that this exercise will add productive volume to your upper body and contribute to an improved bench press.

To set up a floor press, simply move what are called the "J" hooks in your squat rack so they sit just low enough that you can un-rack the bar from a lying position on the floor.

From there, drop the bar weight by about 10-15 percent and perform a few more sets after the bench press, using the same number of repetitions you did with the standard bench press.

PAUSED BENCH PRESS/BENCH PRESS FROM PINS

The same guidelines as the pause squats or pin squats apply here. In this case, pause the bench press on your chest for the allotted time or set the safety pins about 1-2 inches above your chest.

Drop the bar weight by 10-20 percent and perform a few more sets at the same rep range with one of these two variations.

CLOSE-GRIP BENCH PRESS

Bring your grip a few inches closer together and perform the press with the same movement as normal. Just be extra careful about keeping your elbows tucked so they remain under this narrow hand spacing.

CLOSE-GRIP BARBELL BENCH PRESS

Drop the weight by 10-15 percent and perform a few more sets of close-grip bench presses using the same repetition numbers as the standard bench press.

Now go out and give these a try!

bodybuilding.com

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Dragon's Training Tips

QUESTION

I noticed in one of your pre-Olympia videos at FLEXonline that you stop your dumbbell side laterals halfway up. Why do you do that?

ANSWER

I do side laterals the conventional way, too, getting full reps. But the half reps are a favorite of my trainer, Neil Hill. There are only so many ways to work the medial delts, so the half reps are a method of doing something difFerent with side laterals and working just the bottom sections of reps. You can go a little heavier with these. Focus on bringing the dumbbells out as far as possible with your arms perfectly straight, stop at about the halfway point, and keep your delts tense the whole time. The key is to make sure your arms don’t relax at your sides at the beginning of reps. You want to keep constant tension on the medial delts.

QUESTION

When you first started getting press, all anyone talked about were your legs. How were you able to get your upper body in balance with your lower body?

ANSWER

I never wanted to be known for just my legs. Having a balanced physique has always been really important to me. As with anything else, you have to work at it. My legs, especially my calves, grow easily when compared with my chest or back. So there was a time when I barely trained legs at all, and I focused instead almost entirely on my upper body. Rarely training a body part over an extended period does two things. First, that area isn’t going to grow. Depending on how much you train it and with how much intensity, it may even shrink. Second, it allows you to mentally and physically focus more on the other areas. If you don’t have to go through a hard leg workout on Monday, you’re going to be able to give more to your chest workout on Tuesday.

Depending on your own strengths and weaknesses, you may want to train your strongest areas less and your weakest areas more. Maybe your legs are weak and your back is strong. So you might try hitting legs twice a week and back only once every other week. You need to be really honest about your strengths and weaknesses to keep everything in balance. Unfortunately, people tend to train their strongest areas the hardest and neglect their weaker areas, and that only makes things worse. So sometimes the best way to change this is to just not train your strengths for a while until things get back in balance. - FLEX

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