When it comes to the lower body, squat and lunge variations may be a little bit tired in your programming notebook. Giving your quads a new hit is beneficial, specifically if you have limited resources to do it.
Just as you shouldn’t skip leg day when the gym is opened, your lower body shouldn’t suffer during quarantine. Here are five bodyweight moves that you can do anywhere that will force your muscles to grow.
Each one is accompanied by an Instagram video demonstrating how to properly do the move. Incorporate them into your next workout, whether that be a full-body blitz or during the leg portion of your push-pull-leg split.
Still need a new regimen to try out? We have plenty of bodyweight routines for you to choose from here.
Lee Boyce is a personal trainer, speaker, fitness writer, and college professor based in Toronto, Canada. He is the owner and operator of leeboycetraining.com and works with clients and athletes for strength, conditioning, and sport performance. With a background as a varsity level sprinter and long jumper in university amid his kinesiology studies, he now brings plenty of that experience and anecdote to the lectures and workshops he delivers around North America to help make trainers and fitness professionals more effective at their jobs. Follow him on all social media @coachleeboyce.
The rules here are simple: Be sure to keep the glutes tight and have the body move as an entire unit from the knee to the shoulder. Once the body hinges at the hip, you’ve lost plenty of tension in the quadriceps. It won’t take much range of motion for you to work hard, especially if you’re heavy. On top of the hit for the quads, this movement strengthens the knee joint and also is one rare quad exercise that allows the quads to contract from a lengthened position, to optimize the length-tension ratio. If you think about it, that’s a rare treat.
This is surprisingly challenging, and for most lifters, bodyweight alone will suffice. As a lifter who’s undergone a double reconstructive knee surgery, these movements have presented a difficult but necessary challenge to restoring proper knee function.
To single out one leg at a time, assuming a plank position is the way to go. This leg extension movement requires nothing more than an elevated surface to set the top foot up, at which point the emphasis is on nothing more than keeping the hips high while dipping the knee of the working leg down to the ground as far as possible. It’s basically a terminal knee extension disguised as a plank, and it’s sure to light the quads on fire. I like using this as a finisher to workouts, and aiming for high reps is key.
The sissy squat is often given a bad rap based on the fact that it’s more aggressive toward the knees, but for healthy knees – take it from someone who’s been there: That’s kind of the point.
Sometimes the best way to encourage knee health is to go after them. Using a movement like this can do just that. This pattern drives the knee way past the toe, raises the heels, and really focuses on the pressure and load tolerance for the knee joint itself. Not to mention it hammers the quads – which are an often-overlooked weak link to knee weakness and discomfort.
Of course, this comes with a base of foundational strength that a lifter must possess to make this movement a strength builder, and not an injury risk. Working toward an ideal bottom position for your strength, flexibility and mobility levels is imperative. If you can’t touch the floor as seen in the video, simply fall to an elevated surface instead. I like using a step platform for clients who fit this category.
This is possibly the most honest and humbling movement of the list, and requires plenty of focus for proper execution. The quads, as we know, are a group of four muscles, each playing its role in knee extension. The thing is, one of the four quad muscles (the rectus femoris) plays a dual role in also being a hip flexor. To really hit and develop it, it’s often useful to train hip-based patterns over knee-based patterns.
To master this movement, set up a dumbbell, kettlebell, or your water bottle at leg’s reach away from you while you sit on the floor and do your best not to slouch. The closer you can keep your back to extension, the better. Next, set up a completely straight (and I mean locked out) leg, and be sure to point the toes. With that positioning, slowly and gently raise the leg over the kettlebell and tap the heel down on the other side of it. Then return to your starting position. Remember: Don’t slouch or lean away.
This sounds simple, but for 90% of people reading this, it’ll be one of the hardest quad and hip exercises they’ve ever done when performed correctly. When you can pull off 12 good reps per side, use a taller implement, or if you’re a real Rockstar, try doing it with both legs at the same time.
For this, all you need is a band and a sturdy attachment point (a post). One would think this squat variation is a way to attack the glutes and hamstrings even harder than normal due to the fact that the shin gets a chance to stay vertical (typically, more knee-over-toe equals more quad activation). But the reason why these attack the quadriceps is due to two things. First, the tension of the bands pulls the lifter toward the machine. In resisting this force, the lifter will naturally place more of his weight toward the front of the foot. This small change makes for a tonne more quadriceps involvement compared to standard squats.
Second, you can get further down into a deeper squat with this vertical shin than you would without the bands. That equals more knee flexion (a deeper bend), making for more work from the quads to get back out of the hole. Moreover, if you look closely, the legs and hips don’t fully extend. It actually doesn’t serve any great purpose for them to do so, which makes for a more constant tension under load.
Where programming is concerned, I really prefer them after a heavier loaded lower body movement too, so that you can go into them slightly fatigued. This makes the stimulation hit harder with the absence of any weight.
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