Killer Leg Workout (EVEN WITH SORE KNEES!)

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What’s up, guys? Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX. COM. An ATHLEAN XPRESS Video for you. Taking you behind the scenes once again.

A leg workout. My leg workout. For those of you guys who don’t know, I’ve been dealing with some pretty bad leg issues my whole entire life. Having an athletic background, I pretty much trashed my knees back in, oh, I don’t know, 1993 or so. And then never really recovered since, but I’ve still got to train my legs.

And as all athletes, we’ve got to find ways around our ailments. If you’ve got bad knees, figure out moves that don’t bother them so much because the moment you stop working your legs period is the moment you’ve got nothing left at all because you’re legs are going to anchor you through every single thing you do. I don’t care what upper body workout you’re doing. You better have your legs underneath you. So, that being said, I’ll take you through my workout.

What I did here was, I start off with my squats, of course, always. But I do something a little bit unique for me. I do an isometric hold, I start down at 135. My goal here is to literally just try to hold this for about 20 seconds if I can. and I’m just trying to build up some real good stability to feel like I have a good foundation because again, every time I approach my leg workouts, I never know what I’m going to get whether my knees are really marking or if they feel pretty good on a certain day.

I’ve got to test it, and I usually do that right here with this isometric squat hold. Today, they felt pretty damn good so I moved up to 225. And again, I’m not looking to push heavy, heavy weight like I used to guys. For me, it’s all about stability and strength, and to be able to hold my own body in the positions I know I’m going to need them in. And for an athlete, that’s going to be way down deep in this squat position.

And we’ll do it here with pause squats with 225. Ultimately, I work my way up to around 350 and again, I’m going for pause squats here. I’ve got to make sure that my legs always feel good, I always feel in control of what I’m doing because I’ve had too many issues in the past. Secondly, probably my all-time favorite and here, I’m actually able to load up on it because I found a version of the Lunge that does not hurt my knees. and that is here in the Reverse Lunge.

I like to do it with a barbell. I feel like I’m moving bigger weights, and I don’t have to worry about, necessarily, my grip giving out. So, I load up 225 and I go into Reverse Lunge. Again, I’ll do that and I’ll move onto my, and I say ‘my all-time favorite’, this might be my all-time favorite. Again, for an athletic carryover, I love the Dumbbell Bulgarian Split Squat, and here I’ll try to load up and do something a little bit unique.

Again, this position, I don’t feel a lot of pain in my knees because my weight is traveling down and back. Any time I try to move my weight down and forward as I move with a forward-stepping lunge, it bothers me. But if I can go backwards, as I do in a Bulgarian Split Squat, I don’t really feel the pain so much. So, I can do that and I try to add this explosive, we call it the Bulgarian Split Squat Hop, right. We want to explode up as fast as we can.

Basically, what I’m using is the 65s here. It’s really more about acceleration because I really can’t move those 65s all that fast. But, as soon as I drop those weights, I always like to speed it up again. So, whether we’re slowing down the movement because we’re adding weight, I do as an athlete like to speed up the movement at the very end so I’ll drop the weights and do a bodyweight version of this until I fail. And then of course I move on over to the other leg.

For the back side, you guys know I don’t like Lying Hamstrings Curls, Open Chain exercises for hamstrings. So what I like to do is closed chain alternatives. Here, I’ve got my 2 favorites. Physioball and Glute Ham Raise. Again, here the physioball is acting as a spot for me.

As I move myself out and extend out into eccentric hamstring overload, I then can switch it around, use the ball as my spot to actually grab in case I go too far. And then work concentrically to really, really pull up that hamstring, ball up at the top to feel as if I got a really, really intense contraction. And again, I really focus as I do for most of my other exercises, on eccentric component. I feel like if you can’t control the eccentric component, you have no business doing the concentric part of it. So, we’ll do that for the Physioball and Glute Ham Raise.

And then finally, I move on to a Barbell Hip Thrust, and again, closed chain movement. Feet in contact with the ground. You’ve got to play around with this one a little bit. I’ve got, it looks like 205 on the bar here. You’ve got to really push the bar forward on your hips so it obviously doesn’t obviously roll back towards you.

And you want to find that comfort spot sinking into the crease of your hips so it doesn’t really hurt where the barbell is and you feel like it’s really killing you. You can always lay a couple of towels over you if that becomes an issue. Again, if I’m wearing my hoodie here which, as you see, sometimes, when I really want to focus, I’ll flip the hood up because I feel like, you know, there’s no playing around. I cannot afford to have even a single bad rep. Then, you’ll see I’ll have this on for a secondary purpose because it provides some extra cushion on that last exercise.

And on that point, guys, you know, when I do legs, I kind of go into another mode. I will literally take my hood, which I never wear, and I’ll put it up over my head because I want to be zoned in, because for me it’s really, really serious. My legs, my knees, can’t absorb many more bad reps in my life before I can’t use them at all. So, I want to make sure that I’m extremely focused. I’ll put my headphones on.

I’ll stay really, really driven. I don’t want any distractions. And I really concentrate. That’s why I do all those pause reps in the isometric hold. I really want to concentrate on each and every rep.

I can’t give one in. I can’t give one away because I might give away my ability to do that exercise form that point on. So, hopefully, guys, this little look into a leg workout for me will help you guys to understand a little bit more that there are different ways to attack your legs. The key is, have as much athletic carryover as you can if you’re an athlete. Try to stay closed chain.

Keep your feet on the ground. Try the unilateral stances. Have split squat stances like you do in a Lunge, and like you do with the Bulgarian Split Squat because that has a high carryover and transfer to what you do athletically. And if you’re just looking to build, more powerful, athletically strong legs, then you can do that. Add the weight as you can.

Guys, if you found this helpful, make sure you leave a comment and a thumb’s up below. In the meantime, let me know what else you’d like to see, and if you want a complete program, and we train legs pretty intensely in the ATHLEANX System as anybody that has the program can tell you, we hit them from every single angle, and a lot of times guys will curse me out the next day saying they cannot move following our leg workouts But I’ll tell you this, just like every other workout we do, we hit them hard and we hit them quick. Twenty to forty minutes, all out intensity. We’re training in workout length for that intensity to get you better results. Head over to ATHLEANX.

COM right now. In the meantime, I’ll be back here in just a couple days.