How To Structure And Create A Leg Workout For Muscle Growth | The Best Exercises For Legs

If you’re having trouble thinking of exercises to do on leg day or you’re not quite sure how to structure your workout, this article is for you. Today we’re going to be covering our favorite and most effective exercises for building huge legs and how you can build a workout around them with the correct structure and programming. 

Our Seven Favorite And Most Effective Leg Exercises

1. 1. The Barbell Back Squat: The ultimate mass builder for the legs and our favorite compound movement for any body part. We would even call it the king of all exercises as it works many of the muscles in your legs but also engages muscles in your upper body and strengthens your core. 
   2. Leg Extensions: Without a doubt the best isolation exercise for legs. It is a wonderful finisher or pre-exhaustion on leg days.
   3. Lying Hamstring Curl: One of the only ways to hit the hamstring in the shortened position making this a must do exercise. 
   4. Leg Press: Another great compound for quads and even the glutes. Also a great alternative for barbell squats if your knees or lower back aren’t great. Be careful on this one though, you’re trying to build your legs, not your ego.
   5. Romanian Deadlifts: This is an overall great exercise for the entire posterior chain but we have it on this list because of the mass building benefits it has on the hamstrings.
   6. Seated Calf Raises: We had to include one calf exercise on the list, and this was our choice. We feel it provides the best results but one could argue for a standing calf raise and we wouldn’t totally disagree.
   7. Hack Squats: Another great alternative for barbell squats, but it could also be more desirable for someone who really wants to feel the quads. 

How To Structure Your Workout

Now that you know of a couple good exercises to add size to your legs with, let’s talk about building your workout. We believe that there is a correct order and structure to building a workout and that’s what we want to talk about here. Before we start talking about building the workout though, it’s important to remember that there are more leg exercises than just the ones we talked about above and it’s important to pick the exercises that you connect with the most when designing a program or a workout, no matter what body part you’re looking to hit. Once you have the correct exercises picked out, it’s time to start building the workout. We recommend dedicating the first five to ten minutes to a good warmup that will prime you for the workout. After that start with your compounds. You can choose to start with a quad compound or a hamstring compound. You’ll want to start light here and then work up to your working weight and complete a couple working sets at that weight. After this, repeat that same process with a compound that hits the other major muscle group in the legs. So for example, if you did leg press for the quads first, you would want to do Romanian deadlifts for the hamstrings second. After your compounds are done, it’s time to move on to isolation exercises. We recommend doing two to four isolation exercises for the quad and hamstrings combined and then adding in some calf work after that. With the isolation exercises, focus on finishing off the muscle and try training in higher rep ranges as opposed to a lower rep range that we recommend using for compound movements. Once you have exercise selection and order down, you will then need to decide total volume. Total volume can be decided by looking at training frequency and training experience. If you’re decently new to the gym, you’ll want to keep your volume relatively low, but if you’re a novice lifter you’ll want to be hitting a good bit more. As a general rule of thumb though, at least five working sets per muscle growth are required for muscle maintenance, and at least ten are required for muscle growth, but you are likely to see more growth doing more than 10 sets a week. If you’re training twice a week, you’ll want to split this volume between two sessions, but if you’re training once a week you’ll need to get it in all at once. After deciding on volume and exercise selection/order, you should have a full leg workout built. Also, if you’re struggling to build workouts for other muscle groups, apply these methods and it should help you decide how to build your entire workout program, not just your leg workouts. To conclude, we’ll showcase a beginner workout we built to give you more of an idea what a proper leg day should look like.

Here it is:

We hope the methods talked about today will help you in your fitness journey, and always remember that while the workout is important, it’s about how you treat the workout that arguably matters more, meaning that the intensity at which you complete the exercises and whether or not you’re progressively overloading on them will ultimately determine the progress and results you end up seeing. If you want more content just like this, subscribe to our newsletter.