The PERFECT Leg Workout (Backed by Science)

With the return of the perfect workout series, I am updating the perfect leg workout to give you the best leg workout you can do. The biggest difference is that I am giving you not just one, but two perfect leg workouts for you to try that are not just randomly thrown together, but are based on scie

what’s up guys Jeff Cavalier aex. com do you remember the perfect workouts they became the most popular workout series ever here on YouTube and I have you to thank for that and to show my thanks guess what I’m bringing them back by popular demand we continue the series here today this time the perfect lay workout for 2025 and beat what are you doing no offense Jeffrey but if we’re talking perfect legs I’m the one with the perfect legs out of the two of us I mean take a look at these quads oh God look at these glutes I’m enough Hy will you get out of if you want to be in the video all you got to do is ask I just have to ask yeah can I be in the video go get ready for the exercise we please now when it comes to a perfect workout or in this case A Perfect science-based workout I think it’s important to understand that there is no perfect science so any workout that is actually recommended to you based on the latest in science alone is not really going to cut it see here as we’ve always done we rely on the Sciences of anatomy and physiology and Kinesiology and we put it all together in a workout that actually Mak sense and we’re going to do the same thing for you here we’re going to sprinkle in what we know now to be the most effective techniques to employ when we’re trying to build figure legs but not just for today but for the Long Haul right longevity and joint health is also going to be a big concern of mine as a physical therapist and it’s not just because I’m an anatomy nerd but when you’re training the legs it’s not just that there’s a lot of muscles there but there’s also some key joints involved namely the hip in the knee and if you don’t do the exercises right you can kind of mess them up so knowing about the anatomy of the quads and what you want to do to Target them effectively without wearing out your knees is important when it comes to the hamstrings we know that there’s two functions they cross the hip and the knee how do we train them from a straight position in a bent knee position and also not wear out the hip I’m going to lay it all out for you but of course it starts with what the workout looks like now while I say The Perfect Workout what I actually mean is not just one light workout but really two and the reason for that is well we all can agree on everything when it comes to the science of training the one thing we actually can seem to agree on is that frequency should be closer to two times a week rather than one and the reason for that is we know we can restimulate a muscle more effectively and therefore grow it if we hit it every 72 hours however it does relate very much so to the intensity at which we train is if you’re going to go like Mike Menor and train to high high levels of intensity then you’re really not going to be able to recover fast enough to get two workouts in a week and actually benefit from them so instead if you want to go that route you can I have a workout like that for you on this channel it’s called The 100 leg workout you’re going to want to check out however if you’re like the majority of us who just want to put in a good solid effort and see the best results for it then you’re going to want to split these workouts up into two but keep in mind the volume that you used to do in one single workout will be split up across the two workouts and that’s a good thing because you’re going to be able to find that these workouts can be much shorter and in the process of being shorter you’re going to be able to actually train them along with another muscle group as you’ll see as we build out the perfect series but first things first like workout one and two what do they look like well let’s start there are you happy am I in the video now now yes yes I’m happy all right good so leg workout number one as a matter of fact it’s actually good that you’re here CU you can chime in having good experience with these exercises okay but we’re going to start our perfect leg workout the way we started all of our perfect series workouts and that is with a primer exercise and this is a good exercise for getting you ready to do the first real exercise in the workout which we’ll get to in a second your favorite the reverse hyper though does a great job of warming up the posterior chain and most notably here the low back yeah cuz a lot of times I don’t think people spend enough time getting the low back ready to do leg training and whether you’re doing back squatting or deadlifting as you’re going to see here in a second warming your flow back and getting your posterior chain to work together is a good thing right now the reverse hyper is done in a very submaximal way we’re not trying to tire ourselves out here with these primary exercises just one to two sets of 10 to 15 repetitions really really good solid contractions to wake things up but not for the purpose of fatiguing you right which brings us to Jesse’s favorite exercise the deadlift the deadlift now with the deadlift if you have a problem with your back we gave you an option in our perfect back series instead of rowing we gave you a chest supported option here you could do a trap bar deadlift as well which takes some of the strain off of either the low back or even just weakness unable to go all the way down to the floor to get the bar now explain how you did these so I like to do these in a 3x5 setting at 80% of my one rep max I like to put at five because I think that’s a sweet spot for uh the Reps sche yeah so a note on that so A lot of times I think people go either too heavy or too light with a deadlift when you’re talking about having especially two times a week training here you want to have that sweet spot in terms of the volume so that you can come back and train again maybe not the deadlift but just be able to train in general and the strain on your low back can be very high if you are lifting really really heavy weights as you’ve done or it could be even more demanding neurologically and taxing if you’re doing really high rep sets and you’re doing multiples of them yeah exactly and not only that but if you do that it’s going to tire out not just for your next workout but for this entire workout itself true so now 3x5 here if you hit your three sets of five you increase the weight the next time five pounds okay and the goal is to continue to progress guys this is a foundational exercise where we are building strength but yes we’re going to pack size on too and for those that say the deadlift doesn’t work for building your backup oh my God Jesse please guys most of the back work that I’ve done to develop my upper back is face PS of course of course also deadli P most most most of my back development has come from deadlifting not from doings it’s thickness all the way up and down those pair spinals right so that’s where you want to be there now the next exercise is the barbell front squat got to hit the quads you got to hit the quads I actually like this exercise specifically here because we can maintain more of that upright posture and take any of that additional strain off of the low back right so rather than obviously back squatting and deadlifting back to back the front squats going to allow us to go a little bit lighter on the waist but not too light no right you still want to go heavy here because you want to overload the quads as much as you can yeah I do think that especially as we get older I think the biggest mistake people make make is to back off from the weights that they’re using in terms of the weight itself cuz you start to just get weak and the one thing you don’t want to do is get weak as you get older it