The BEST Dumbbell Exercises - LEGS EDITION!

Dumbbell exercises do not have to be less effective when it comes to building your legs - as long as you choose the right dumbbell leg exercises. In this video, I will show you the best dumbbell exercises for legs that will hit your quads, hips, glutes and hamstrings. As always in this series, I’m

JEFF: Today we continue our best dumbbell exercise series. This time, bringing you the legs edition. Let’s get this out of the way right off the bat. Your best exercise options, when it comes to your legs, are likely going to involve a barbell. Squat and deadlifts, to name a few.

However, that’s not the rule of the series. As we’ve continued from the very beginning, there are some rules in place. I’ve got select dumbbell exercises, but I request a favor in return. I need to at least be able to categorize them. Based on training goals, I need to be able to slot in those exercise choices for strength, hypertrophy, power, a metabolic exercise, a total body option, a corrective exercise option, and one of those miscellaneous that doesn’t really fit into any of those other categories.

So, what I’m going to do is break those down, exercise by exercise and I’m going to- JESSE: Whoa. Whoa. JEFF: Can I get through a video without you? JESSE: Whoa. I think I should be taking care of this video because, as we know, I’ve made some serious leg gains.

JEFF: Okay. Freddy Mercury? JESSE: Thank you for the compliment on the mustache, by the way. JEFF: It wasn’t a complement. I think I can handle this, as I always handle my videos.

But I wouldn’t call myself – why do you think you can do this? JESSE: Because I think you should be calling me the ‘King of Quads’. JEFF: The King of Quads? JESSE: The King of Quads. I think that’s a better nickname than Freddy Mercury.

JEFF: I don’t think it’s really King of Quads. JESSE: You know, it looks more like the Queen of Quads to me. JEFF: See? I agree. That’s a better name for you, actually.

JESSE: I can’t win, can I? JEFF: NO, you can’t. All right, guys. We’re going to kick it off with our strength exercise. I’m going to give you two because I want to give you one anterior chain, knee dominant exercise and one posterior chain, hip dominant exercise because it matters.

JESSE: Whoa. Pardon me, pardon me. When you say, ‘posterior chain’, are we talking about the glutes? Like a fat bottomed girl? Because, as we all know ‘Fat bottom girls, you make the rockin’ world go ‘round’.

JEFF: Are we going to have to do this the whole video? Guys, let’s start with the anterior chain, knee dominant exercise. We’re talking about the reverse lunge. One of my favorite exercises you can do. I love unilateral training, but I also like the fact that we can load this one a little bit heavier.

You can use 100lb plus dumbbells if you want and if you can manage them. The fact is, it’s how you perform the exercise that matters. Here, for anterior chain, because we can sit back and upright, we can really load up on the quads in a big way. Now, you can see when Jesse does this he’s stepping, not just straight back because that would narrow his base of support and make the exercise vulnerable to someone that has a weak balance. But we don’t need to do that.

As he steps back you can also step a little bit out to widen that base of support, widen his stance, and give himself the best opportunity to continue to load the exercise for the purpose of building his strength. Now, if we switch over to the other side here, we’re going to go posterior chain. My exercise for this is going to be the Romanian deadlift. Again, what we do here is perform this in the same way we would with a barbell. We let the dumbbells slide down and the main focus here is allowing the hips to hinge backward.

I’m not even caring where the dumbbells go. Their travel should be straight up and down. The main thing you should be focused on is the movement in the sagittal plane of the hips. Get them to creep back as far as your hamstring length will allow you. When you get there, you initiate the return by squeezing and driving with the glutes back up to the top.

If you’re limited in the depth that you can go because of the flexibility of your hamstrings, it shouldn’t compromise the fact that you can still load them with as heavy dumbbells as you can possibly hold here, still getting great benefits from the exercise. Moving on, we go to the hypertrophy exercise selections. Once again, I’m going to give you two. One more for the anterior chain, one more for the posterior chain. My anterior chain selection is always the Bulgarian split squat.

JESSE: I’m sorry, did you say, ‘Bohemian split squat’? That’s a part of my favorite song “Bohemian Rhapsody”. JEFF: I said we’re not doing this the whole video. JESSE: Do you want me to leave? JEFF: I want you to leave.

Desperately. JESSE: I’m just a poor boy, I need no sympathy. JEFF: The Bulgarian split squat is a great exercise for the anterior chain. Why? We’re able to do it two ways.

We can do it in a more anterior-dominant, or posterior-dominant way, depending upon how we align our torso. Let’s check out the anterior chain first. If you’re going to load your quads and train your quads here, your main focus should be keeping an upright torso, as much as possible. Chest out, shoulders back, drop straight down, and load the quad. Now, what we can do, if we want to get more out of this and make this even more of a hypertrophy overload, we can add in some intensity techniques like the one-and-a-half technique, which is one of my favorites.

You go down to the bottom, you go only halfway, you have to go back to the bottom again, and then you return up. We can also change this exercise, like I said, to become more posterior chain dominant. All that requires is a change in torso position. You can see Jesse leans his torso a little more forward to lower that posterior chain. Nothing changes from this point on.

As he goes down, the back-angle stays angled forward. He drives up, and back. You’ll immediately be able to feel the difference in the load shifting toward the glutes to perform the exercise. Again, the same techniques could still be used here by prolonging the amount of tension we focus on those muscles to create more of a hypertrophy benefit. Moving on now, we’re at the category of power.

To choose an exercise properly here, you have to have one that allows you to accelerate the weights that you’re moving. Power is going to rely on your ability to move the weights you’re moving quickly. My favorite exercise here is the dumbbell jump squat. This exercise is designed to not only become more explosive but carries over well to some of the more explosive exercises, like the hang-clean and power-clean. The key here is to choose a weight that’s not too heavy, which will slow down your ability to perform this properly.

I like to aim for a weight that’s combined to be about 25% to 50% of your bodyweight. So, if you’re a 200lb person, you’re looking at a combined weight of 50lbs. So 25lbs in each hand. Remember, you want to make sure you’re achieving triple extension. Meaning, you want to extend through the ankles, the knees, and then the hips in that sequence to allow the kinetic chain to pass that power from the ground up, into this explosive jump.

But it doesn’t just end there. You also have to make sure you can eccentrically control the landing, reset, recoil, and prepare yourself for another high-quality repetition. It’s not about training to failure when you’re training for power. It’s not about training to a certain level of fatigue. What you’re trying to do is accumulate only high quality, powerful repetitions in a defined period of time to maximize that speed output and maximize your overall power generation.

Moving on now, we have an option for a metabolic overload. JESSE: Whoa! Whoa! JEFF: Knowing that we can- JESSE: I know this one! I know this one!

We’re talking about bicycles, aren’t