WHY YOU HATE LEG DAY!!

Leg day is one of the most hated workout days in the gym. People go so far as to skip it all together because they dread enduring another set of squats, lunges, leg presses or step ups. Don’t let this be you ever again. After watching this video, you are going to know the real reason why you hate

What’s up, guys? Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX. com. Is there anything more polarizing than leg day? Those two words can literally send shivers down somebody’s spine, or get somebody else very excited to train that day.

There’s a reason. There’s a very stark reason why people have this feeling inside. Whether they like it, or they hate it. That reason is: the person that loves it likely has gone through the necessary progression to get to love it. The person that doesn’t was likely forced too far ahead of where they should have been at an early stage.

I’m going to give you a scientific validation, though, for why you probably do hate leg day, if you’re in that camp. Scientifically, we’re working over 50 muscles in our legs when we train them. Which means, there’s a lot more work being done. The legs are getting taxed a lot more, your body is getting taxed a lot more, you feel like you want to puke when you have a successful workout. A lot harder than, maybe, training your biceps, right?

There is some real work being done here. That’s the scientific validation, but really, what it all comes down to is what I said in the beginning. Which path did you take? If you took the wrong path and you jumped ahead, here’s what happened to you. You likely had some sort of external pressure that made you squat under a bar where you were lifting too much weight, and you couldn’t handle it.

You shouldn’t have handled it. Your body wasn’t ready to handle it. That could be from watching YouTube videos of guys that squat a lot of damned weight. That doesn’t mean you should be. Your body needs to be ready to squat.

You could start with very light weights, and that’s where you should start if you want to build a foundation. But a lot of us are embarrassed by the weights that we have. So there’s another external pressure. “I don’t want to go to the gym and squat 135lbs, God forbid 115lbs with some 35s on the end. That’s going to look bad.

” So what do I do? I run over to the leg press and I start doing leg presses. Now, I don’t believe in that because that’s hiding weaknesses. The leg press is one of the easiest places to hide weaknesses. Anyone could throw four, or five plates on the side and think they’re strong, or you’ve got the guys who throw 10s, and 10s of plates on each side and think they’re really strong.

They’re not. It’s not a true test of leg strength. What you want to do is get over those fears, stop reading those magazines, stop watching the videos and being inspired to the point where you’re trying to copy them. Start realizing that they built up the necessary strength to get there, and then you’ll actually start liking leg day because if you do the wrong thing again you wind up hindering your entire experience for two reasons. One, if you try to put all the weight on the bar that you shouldn’t be handling and you half-ass rep everything you’re doing, you put no work into your quads, you make your glutes do nothing because you don’t get down low enough.

And you think “I don’t know what the hell is going on here. Genetically, I have it bad. My legs don’t respond. I have bad leg genetics. ” No.

You’ve never actually trained your legs. You’ve trained everything else. You’ve compensated your weight through every workout, but you never got any real training effect on your legs because you’ve never actually loaded them. That’s why you hate it, and that’s why the underdevelopment that you’re seeing is not some curse, but a result of poor training. You’ll actually start to like leg training if you load properly.

But you’re going to have to start from the beginning. The other thing is, you’ve decided “I’m going to do it, and I’m going to compensate the hell out of every rep I do so my knees are taking a beating, my ankles are taking a beating, my hips are taking a b eating”. The only joints you’re ever going to get in your life, by the way, so you should be protecting them. But you do the opposite because you want to lift that weight and you damage your joints in the process. So now when you attack leg training you hate every second of it too, because it hurts.

Now I actually fell into that latter camp. When I was young I had some expectations I was supposed to hit as part of playing high school football. We had some benchmarks that we needed to hit so I banged away at half-ass squats to hit those benchmarks. Meanwhile, I did nothing but torture to my joints in the process. I pay for it to this day.

What I did is what I’m recommending you do. Start all over again. There are a lot of people watching this video who probably have some respectable squat numbers, but if you really, truly tested your strength in the squat – meaning, can you get down to below hip level? Can you maintain that? Could you hold that rep if you had to?

Could you get back out of the hole without compensation? Could your bar path look good on the way down, and look just as damn good going back up? ’ If it’s changing as you go down, versus up, you’re making compensations. Could you even goblet squat half your bodyweight for 20 reps, in perfect form? Because if you can’t, you shouldn’t even be under a bar.

So there’s a lot of criteria here that you need to be able to hit and it requires that you get honest with yourself, and step backward, and go all the way back to the basics, and start squatting with perfect form, realizing “I’m strong enough for that weight. ” Now, add a little bit more. “I’m strong enough for that weight. ” Add a little bit more. You’re likely going to be shocked at where you stop.

You’re likely going to be derailed at a far lower weight than you’re using right now because you’re actually going to start truly hitting the honest truth about what your capacity is to squat properly. But when you do that, and you direct all that force into your quads, and you direct the force into your glutes, and you direct the force into the muscles, and not the joints themselves; your legs will start to respond. I don’t care what stage of the game you’ve been lifting. I don’t care if you’ve been squatting for 25 years. You’ll start to get better results from your leg training.

You will not have all that residual joint pain. You’re going to start to feel a hell of a lot better, and you’re going to start to see gains again. We all know when we start seeing gains we start liking those workouts again. That’s what’s going to happen to you. I promise you it’s going to happen to you because it’s happened to me.

I struggle with the squat. Guys, I’ve been working on the squat, but I had to back it all the way down. I had to go back down. I even started with the bar, and I started to add weight there, and now I’m squatting a heavy weight again – for me – and I’m actually doing it well, I feel great, and my knees aren’t bothering me. As a result, even my legs have now become one of my stronger points.

At least they’re complementing the rest of my body. The same thing can happen to you, too. Guys, this is one of those instances where all of us – all of us – should be checking our ego, and really, truly evaluating what our squat abilities are. If you’re a new guy starting out, please don’t get clouded by the advice and recommendations of what you ‘should’ be doing. The only thing you should be doing is squatting with great form, and executing every rep the way the squat was actually designed to be done.

When you do that, the results will follow. Guys, if you’re looking for a program that puts, not just the science back in strength, but I always say here too, “The truth in training”. The truth is, you should only be lifting what you can handle, and then from there, challe