CHECKLIST: 13 Reasons Why Your Legs Won’t Grow

1. You do not train them enough

Legs are a very complex muscle group.

You can’t train them once a week and expect them to grow.

You need to train them more frequently.

You also need to increase the amount of reps you are doing.

Lower the weight and increase it 15-20 reps per leg exercise.

If you want to work with heavier weight, work with a weight that you can get i around 8-10 reps

3 sets of 10 and calling it a day is not going to grow or build muscles on your legs.

You may want to do about 6-8 sets for one workout and come back another day in the week and do another 6-8 sets.

2. You don’t train all areas of your legs

You need to train your Glutes, hamstrings and calves.

It’s the same as a building muscular arms. You have to train your triceps more than your biceps as they make up to two thirds of your arm size.

The same concept applies to your legs, train behind your legs just as much, if not more than your quadriceps.

You have to do your leg curls.

3. You’re not putting in enough effort

As you are ending your leg day exercise, take it to a place you’ve never went before.

For example:

Do 15 reps, drop the weight a little bit then do another 10 reps

Then drop the weight and then slowly go down and up.

Then hold the weight at the mid range of motion for about 20 seconds.

Putting in more effort ≠ killing yourself

4. Not going full range of motion

It’s crucial to be getting a DEEP stretch in you’re leg excercises.

If for whatever reason your body structure doesn’t allow you safely get a full range of motion on a certain exercise without compromising or putting your spine or bones at risk of injury, then reconsider switching to an alternative exercise which doesn’t put your body at risk.

I am a fan of the barbell squat, but my body structure doesn’t allow me to do it safely without injuring my spine.

So after Leaving the gym with a bad back after many sessions, I have replaced it with HACK SQUAT machine.

This machine allows me to safely get a DEEP squat whilst my spine is supported and not compromised.

The hack (DEEP) squat is a great way to lengthen the muscle and it’s certainly a tough workout 😮‍💨

To really build your legs, you have to get a deep stretch in your movements.

5. Single Leg Work

Some movements work better when you focus on doing them one leg at a time e.g. split squats (great exercise by the way)

Single leg work is very good because the weakness and bad form of one leg cannot be made up for by your stronger leg.

Bulgarian split squats

Lunges

Be careful with doing single leg exercises on the the leg press because it can cause knee issues.

6. Not allowing to recover

It’s been said in the fitness world that you have to hit certain muscle group a certain amount of time a week.

So now people start thinking that they have to (over)train…. Even when their body is still sore from the last workout.

Again: Putting in more effort ≠ killing yourself

If your body is sore you need to allow yourself to recover.

Your muscles can’t produce as much force when the muscle fibres are recovering.

When your body is sore you will see a decrease in performance

Instead of training when you are sore. Stay home and recover or train a different body part (which isn’t sore) on that day and then train that body part another day (assuming you’re no longer sore)

Yes, the best results come from frequently hitting a muscle group but it doesn’t mean to compromise yourself and risk injury.

Putting in more effort ≠ killing yourself

Train smart so you can train forever.

7. Pain tolerance

You have to train with a certain degree of pain.

Assuming it’s good pain, where you feel the muscle really stretched and burning. Not the type of pain where your bones and joints are hurting.

Don’t stop when you start feeling a slight burn.

Training legs is gonna hurt, you just have to accept that and understand the difference between good pain and bad pain.

Embrace the good pain and work through it.

What makes people quit is because the pain messes up with their breathing, so you have to make sure your breathing pattern is not messed up when you start feeling the burn.

So it’s not because of the actual workout, it’s because your mind isn’t able to tolerate the pain so your body almost goes into a hyperventilation mode.

Just take a second and get your breathing in order then breath through the exercise.

Don’t let the pain dictate how you’re going to breath.

8. Training tempo is too fast

You have to have a degree of control, control the tempo of the movement, don’t let the bar or the machine just come crashing down.

Control it as you go up

Control it as you go down

9. Training Tempo is too slow

If you’re squatting and you go down very slow, you want to come up controlled and aggressively

When the muscle is about to be the most engaged (contracting) you want to be a bit more aggressive on that concentric movement. Whether it’s up or down.

So you don’t want too be too fast with your tempo

But you don’t want to be too slow either, specifically on the concentric part of the movement.

10. Poor range of motion

Not just for legs, but for any exercise, you don’t want to half ass the exercise.

If your body structure doesn’t allow you to properly do an exercise, replace it with one that does.

There are occasions where you may have to do half reps where your barely completing the movement, but this is usually when your muscle is extremely fatigued and your trying to squeeze the last bit of reps.

Your entire routine should not be filled with you half assing the workouts and just doing half or quarter reps.

Do the exercise with full range of motion because failure to do this will lead to you not seeing any results.

11. Too much cardio

Unless you’re a professional athlete, calm down with the cardio.

You don’t need to run 10 miles everyday.

Your body needs to recover.

So your issue might be that you’re doing way too much cardio (even it’s a 10 minute HIIT workout).

If you wana do cardio, do something which doesn’t beat your legs up as much.

12. Eating properly

Training legs is VERY VERY physically demanding.

You have to pay attention to your nutrition.

When you wana train your legs hard, you want to have the right size small meal before you train.

I like having oats before my sessions, it gives me a lot of energy.

And then you wana have a good meal after your training session.

Training legs is very physically demanding, and if you’re not eating properly, you will feel weak and get exhausted very quickly.

13. Have a challenge set

A challenge set is a set where you just go crazy lol.

For example, I’d get on the leg press machine and put a very light ammount of weight (or sometimes no weight at all) and I’ll do 100 reps without pausing.

That’s what a challenge set is.

Or you could see how many reps you can do in a certain time limit

E.g. how many body weight squats can I do in 3 minutes

The main point of a challenge set is to go somewhere in your workout you have never gone before.

You don’t have to challenge sets every session because of how much they get out of you, so again, you need to give that bodypart (in this case your legs) time to recover before you do another challenge set.

Also, think about how you’re going to put them into your session.

You don’t want to do 100 leg presses when you’ve still gotta go and squats, splits squats and hamstring curls.

You’d most likely wana leave the challenge set as a way to finish your session.

Train smart so you can train forever.

Till next time