The Ultimate Science-Based Leg Day For Muscle Growth (2023)

foreign okay what's going on guys and Welcome to our first leg day of the ultimate push-pull leg Series in this video we're doing six lower body exercises that Target the quads hamstrings glutes and calves and then we're finishing things off with one exercise for the ABS alright so as usual we're starting with a quick General warm-up this is especially important on leg day because it's literally half your body so I'll do a solid five to ten minutes on the treadmiller StairMaster and then go through a quick series of dynamic stretches that I'll put up here

on the screen it looks like more than it is usually only takes me about two minutes tops from there we're jumping into just one heavy set of two to four reps on the squat remember in this push-pull legs routine we're using a minimalistic approach to strength and an optimization approach to hypertrophy so for the squat bench press and deadlift we're just doing one hard set per week that's it and then we'll do two back offsets with some variation for each lift so here I'll do a pyramid warm-up and weight across four or five warm-up sets

as you can see here on the screen until I get to my working weight which will be something range of 85 to 90 percent of my one rep max for two to four reps so let's say your one rep max is 405 pounds you'd want to choose a weight around 345 pounds to 365 pounds for your top set of two to four reps this shouldn't be an rpe 10 Max effort set but it should be something around an rpe of eight or nine so you don't want to be leaving more than one or two reps

in the tank and remember we're only doing one set so it does need to be challenging now if you're someone who only cares about building muscle and couldn't care less about strength or if you can't squat or simply don't want to squat you can replace the squat work with hack squats as a first substitution option or Bulgarian split squats as a second option in either case to make it a bit more hypertrophy focused you can just boost the rep range to four to six reps instead of two to four reps and keep everything else the

same after the heavy top set we're doing two back offsets for five reps on the paused squat where we'll be pausing for about one to two seconds in the hole on each rep for these you'll want to drop the weight back to about 75 of what you did for your heavy top set so let's say you did 365 pounds for your top set you do around 275 pounds for your pod squats for five Reps for these you want to take in a big breath at the top and then sit back and down between your legs

keeping your breath held as you pause for one to two seconds and then explode up out of the hole with as much explosive force as possible as you explode up try to keep in mind that the bar should travel in as close to a straight line as possible centered over the middle of your foot and in general I like pod squats because doing five paused reps is a lot harder than doing five normal reps that's because when you pause you lose any stored elastic energy in your tendons which forces your quads and glutes to overcome

the load from a dead stop and because they're so much harder this means you're forced to use lighter weights which means you can get the same hypertrophic stimulus with lighter loads and less overall joint and body stress pausing also helps ensure that you're reaching proper depth on each and every rep and can help ingrain good technique habits for any heavier sets you do as well okay after squads we're moving on to three sets of 8 to 10 wraps on the barbell Romanian deadlift just a quick technique recap here you want to lift the barbell off

the rack take two or three steps back push your hips back as the weight drops down and then reverse the motion once the bar gets somewhere between just below knee level and mid Shin level or at least before your lower back starts to round then you should reverse the motion by lifting your chest up and thrusting your hips forward a little knee Bend is fine but you should try to keep a more or less vertical Shin angle keeping the bar in tight and centered over the middle of your foot now there are two common concerns

I hear about rdls the first is that some people say they only feel it in their lower back not in their hamstrings and if this applies to you the first thing I do is make sure that you're not letting the barbell drift forward away from your legs this can cause the low back to take over in order to pull the bar back in remember that the bar should be moving straight up and straight down I also find that wearing a belt can help with this issue even though EMG data shows that overall wearing a belt

shouldn't substantially reduce lower back muscle activity I do find it helps me to direct more attention to my hamstrings and reduces that uncomfortable lower back pump that you can sometimes feel with rdls now obviously the spinal Erectors have to contract on rdls to prevent you from just curling over so it's impossible to completely take the lower back out but you can shift the emphasis to the hamstrings a bit more with those two tips another common question I get is how to Target the hamstrings more versus the glutes more with rdls this one's pretty simple if

you want to Target your glutes more think about squeezing your glutes to move the weight and then you can optionally squeeze your glutes together at the top of the lift that glute squeeze honestly probably isn't doing a whole lot on its own but can help some people sort of find the muscle better with this cue you can almost think of the lift more like a vertical hip thrust on the other hand if you want to make it more hamstring dominant I would just completely cut out the top 10 to 25 percent of the lift this

will keep more of the emphasis on the hamstring stretch and the bottom half and you can even add a little pause at the bottom to accentuate the stretch further alright so after that we're moving on to two sets of 10 reps per leg on the dumbbell walking lunge so that's 20 total strides per set for this one I figured I'd highlight three things that you should avoid when doing walking lunges first avoid cutting your depth short notice that on each and every rep my knee softly makes contact with the floor it's very common for people

to start limiting their depth toward the end of the set once the wraps start getting really hard but it's a lot better to be more consistent with your reps rather than just aiming for an arbitrary rep count while cutting many of those reps short now if you're afraid of hurting your knees on the floor you may be making the second mistake on my list which is Free Falling on the negative a lot of people try to rush through their lunges because they are a fairly gruesome exercise but despite that you should think of them like

you should any other hypertrophy focused movement where you're actively controlling and resisting the negative if you're letting gravity take over on the negative then you're missing out on the most important aspect of the lift so take your time and be intentional with every rep you do and the third thing to avoid is letting your grip strength limit the load that you can use a lot of people go way too light on walking lunges they end their set once they feel fatigued but don't actually approach muscular failure one of the main reasons for this is that

they just pick up some relatively light dumbbells that they can grip easily but we're not trying to train our forearms here so if your grip is a limiting factor I definitely recommend strapping in and using some dumbbells that'll actually get your legs close to failure by the end of the set okay after that we're moving on to three sets of 10 to 12 reps on the seated leg curl another couple quick tips here first remember that there was a study published in 2021 which found that seated leg curls led to about 56 percent more muscle

growth than lying leg curls across a 12-week training study and the most likely reason for this is that the seated leg curl was challenging the hamstrings in a more lengthened position than the line leg curl in other words you can load the hamstrings with more stretch when you're seated than when you're lying however if you set the seat too far back you actually lose a lot of that stretch so you want to make sure that your torso is positioned far enough forward on the machine that you feel a solid stretch in your hamstrings before you

start the set if you don't feel any stretching or hamstrings in the starting position you may not have the seat up far enough or you may want to lean forward over the machine a bit until you feel that tug of passive tension in your hamstrings also remember that the hamstrings cross both the hip joint and the knee joint so pointing the toes in or out rotating the legs at the hip does seem to impact which area of the hamstrings is emphasized at least EMG evidence shows that the inner hamstrings activate more when the toes are

pointed in and the outer hamstrings activate more when the toes are pointed out so for this one you can think of pointing your toes in the direction of the region you're trying to emphasize Point them out for the outer hamstrings and point them in for the inner hamstrings of course because EMG readings have never been formally validated as being predictive of long-term hypertrophy outcomes you should think of this suggestion as just something to play around with rather than a proven fact but since we're doing three sets here anyway why not point the toes slightly out

for the first set slightly in for the second set and then straight ahead for the third set of course if you feel your hamstrings working much better with one toe position over the others I'd simply roll with that one and if either position feels awkward or uncomfortable for you there's no reason that you have to do it but assuming they all feel fine to you why not switch it up from set to set for some variety okay up next we're doing four sets of 10 to 12 reps on the leg press toe press and I

like doing this movement for the calves because after a high volume leg day like this one you can just sit down and give your back and your hips a little break while you focus entirely on the calves now similar to the leg curl pointing your toes in different directions can impact which region of the calves are emphasized except unlike with the leg curl we can say this with much more confidence for the calves because we actually have a long-term training study that measured muscle growth directly this is a figure from a 2020 study that had

22 subjects trained their calves for nine weeks with either their feet pointed out feet pointed in or feet pointed straight ahead and as you can see in the figure pointing the toes out through the medial or inside part of the calves better while pointing the toes in glue the lateral or outside part of the calves better and pointing them straight ahead grew both the inside and the outer side pretty evenly so this tells us that if you're trying to grow the outer calves a bit more you should consider pointing your toes in if you're trying

to grow the inner calves a bit more maybe so they're more visible from the front you should try pointing your toes out and since we're doing four sets here we might as well experiment with the different positions so I'd suggest pointing them out for set one pointing them in for set two and then pointing them straight ahead for set three and four or again similar to the leg curl if either position feels particularly awkward for you or significantly limits the amount of load you can use I just go with the position that you feel strongest

and most comfortable with and then to finish off the workout we're doing three sets of 10 to 12 reps on the decline plate crunch I find that direct ab work doesn't fit perfectly into either the push pull or leg day but I tend to put ab work on my leg days just because most ab work will also work the hip flexors which will be nice and warmed up after all that leg work so for this one you want to hold a plate to your chest and focus on squeezing your abs together don't just hinge at

your hips that'll mostly target the hip flexors instead allow your lower back to round as you squeeze your six-pack together over time you should be keeping track of the weights you're using and the number of reps you're hitting while aiming to add either some weight or a rep from session to session this will ensure that you're actually progressively overloading your abs and triggering their development just a few overloading sets like this will do a whole lot more for increasing that pop Factor on your midsection than pretty much any amount of cardio style AB circuits will

and in a fraction of the time okay so after this leg day we've got the first half of the full week of training completed and I'll be covering the remaining three workouts in three upcoming videos here on the channel but if you'd like to have the full 12 weeks of training all in one place right away you can pick up the full ultimate push-pull legs hypertrophy system over on jeffnipper.com the program comes with a full ebook explaining all the methods used in the program and Excel spreadsheet a library full of exercise demos from me coaching

cues for every exercise and plenty more it also comes in a four day five day and six day per week version so you can still run the program even if you don't have six days per week available to train so I'll leave a little more info about that in the description box down below and that's it for this one guys thank you so much for watching don't forget to leave me a thumbs up if you enjoyed the video subscribe if you haven't already and I'll see you guys all here in the next one