The Perfect Leg Day (According To Science)

okay what's going on guys in this video I'm going to be taking you through six lower body exercises that'll Target the quads hamstrings glutes and calves plus one exercise for the ABS at the end as always we're kicking things off with a five to ten minute warm-up on the treadmill or StairMaster followed by some quick lower body specific Dynamic stretching to get the knees and hips mobile and ready to lift from there we're jumping into our first exercise of the day which is a deadlift for just one heavy top set of five reps and of

course before hitting that top set we'll do our typical warm-up pyramid gradually building up in weight first now if you don't like to deadlift you can feel free to replace it with a trap bar deadlift which will keep the back more upright and emphasize the quads a bit more or you can do a barbell hip thrust as a more glute dominant substitution or you can do Bulgarian split squats as a more quad dominant substitution still emphasizing that forward lean a little more than usual so that some of that emphasis will be shifted to the glutes

and hamstrings alright so the deadlift top set should be taken to an rpe of eight or nine meaning you're leaving no more than one or two reps in the tank and since the volume is lower here it's important that we compensate by pushing the set closer to failure still since we don't want this strength work to interfere with the remaining leg volume to follow in this workout we don't want the set to be cripplingly difficult either if you're more interested in increasing your deadlift strength over the coming weeks you can drop one rep each week

as you simultaneously add weight this is called linear periodization which is when the rep volume decreases as the weight on the bar increases so you do five reps in week one four reps in week two three reps in week three two reps in week four one rep max and week five adding weight each week and then take a deload in week six by hitting four reps at a lighter load if you don't care about strength at all and you're only concerned with hypertrophy I'd say to just stick with five reps the whole way through and

aim to either increase the weight or improve some aspect of your Technique from week to week alright after that heavy top set we're going to strip the weight back and do two sets of eight reps on the stiff-legged deadlift for these I'll usually drop from something in the range of 405 pounds on my top set down to 225 pounds for the stiff leg pulls so something around 50 to 60 percent of your working weight is probably in the right ball power for your back offsets and you want to think of these as essentially just a

normal conventional deadlift except with higher hips so instead of dropping your hips down as you bend your knees during the normal deadlift setup with a stiff leg deadlift you want to keep your hips High keep your knees more straight and then initiate the pull by just hinging at your hips these can be a bit awkward if you haven't done them before so make sure you start light and don't push them too close to failure until you feel fully comfortable with the technique okay next we're moving on to four sets of 10 to 12 reps on

the leg press now since the deadlifts will be much more hamstring and glute dominant we're focusing on smashing the quads here with some high volume leg press for these I take a medium stance width on the platform and focus on hitting quality depth at the bottom of each and every rep you want to go as deep as you comfortably can without allowing your lower back to round noticeably I also find that even though locking out the knees at the top isn't actually dangerous and I can link a great video from Dr Mike Israel on that

down below I do find that I can feel my quads a lot better if I maintain a slight knee Bend at the top so I'm using more of a constant tension approach here by not locking the weight out at the top and not pausing in between reps just getting all the way to 10 to 12 reps with a smooth consistent Cadence I should also note that you should really try to adhere to a maximum of two minutes of rest in between sets here that isn't because it's any better or worse for gains but simply because

if you rest too long on these the workout will most likely start to feel really dragged out and you may start to lose focus by set three or four so keep the pace of the workout going and don't stall or waste time in between sets Okay after that we're hitting three sets of eight to ten reps on the glute ham raise now I'm using this ghr machine at my gym which I love because you can use a counterbalance weight to reduce the loading this helps me control the movement better than I could with body weight

alone however if you don't have a machine like this you can easily set up glued ham raises on the back of a lap pull-down machine and you can use a stick or a broom handle as a counterweight or you can use a lap pull down bar if that works or if you find that awkward you can have a partner pin down your ankles and do Nordic ham curls controlling the negative as much as you can and then using your hands to push you up at the bottom on these I try to stay in the so-called

active range because there's zero tension on the hamstrings at the top so I just cut out that top quarter of the movement this isn't a huge deal but I just find it helps me keep the focus on my hamstrings better okay next we're moving on to three sets of eight to ten reps on the slow eccentric leg extension even though we already hit the quads on the leg press and that will be enough to trigger growth remember that the big rectus femoris head of the quads isn't hit very well on leg presses that's because the

rectus femoris is the only head of the quads that crosses both the knee joint and the hip joint so it never really reaches its full contractile potential with compound movements this is actually even worse on the squat because the hips get to full extension at the top so for this reason I try to include leg extensions at least once per week allowing that rectus femora's head to reach Peak contraction we're also using a three second count on the negative of every rep here this will accomplish two things first The Eccentric is likely more hypertrophic than

the concentric so ensuring high levels of tension on The Eccentric is very important and secondly slowing down the negative will force you to use lighter loads which should put less strain on the knees without compromising the hypertrophic stimulus of the set alright after that we're doing four sets of 15 to 20 reps on the seated calf raise even though I'm a bit more on the fence about seated calf raises these days than I was in the past I still think that if you have access to both a seated machine and a standing machine it does

make sense to include both so do one calf exercise with a straight knee and one calf exercise with a bent knee for maximum calf development the reason I say I'm more on the fence about them these days is because a bunch of Studies have come out showing that the soleus muscle which is the muscle people try to Target with seated calf raises is substantially less responsive to training than the gastroc is this 2020 study found that the Soleus responds quite poorly to both High rep and low rep training so the idea that you can Target

the slow twitch dominant Soleus with higher reps seems to be outdated in light of this new evidence so you could argue that whatever volume you're doing trying to Target the Soleus on the seated calf raise you'd be better off doing that volume with a straight leg to get the gastroc more involved this makes sense to me and if you want to replace your seated calf work with standing calf work I think that's fairly reasonable however I'd really like to see a long-term hypertrophy study directly comparing Soleus growth and gastroc growth on the seated calf raise

versus the standing calf raise before jumping to that conclusion if it turns out that the standing calf raise is in fact better for gastroc growth and Soleus growth then I'd say we might as well throw the seated calf raise out but until we have that study I still think including both is probably slightly better for most people however if you don't have access to a seated calf raise machine you probably aren't missing out on much if anything and even though High Reps or low reps doesn't seem to matter for the Cavs all that much I'm

still doing higher reps on these just for variety and since we did relatively lower reps on the first leg day of the week alright and to finish off the workout we're doing three sets of 10 to 20 reps on the Roman Chair leg raise the reason I'm saying 10 to 20 reps is because for some people 10 reps will be close to failure for others they won't be pushing it very hard until they're closer to 20 reps so the specific rep count doesn't matter here as long as you're pushing yourself close to failure once you

can no longer get your legs up to your chest level without excessive swinging you can terminate the set and as you do these you want to think about curling your low lower back and squeezing your abs not just lifting your legs up also if you can't get to at least 10 reps with straight legs in good form I'd suggest using a more bent knee first and then over time you can transition to straight leg raises as you build up more core strength and then on the Other Extreme if 20 reps feels too easy you should

slow down the negative on each rep down to a two to three second count and then if that's still too easy for you it may be time to move on to a new YouTube channel maybe something like six-pack shortcuts and that's a wrap for the six part push-pull leg series as I've been saying throughout the series if you're looking to put all this information together into a complete training routine so you have everything you need in one place I'd recommend checking out my 12-week push-pull legs hypertrophy system over on jeffnipper.com if you'd like to learn

more about that program and to see if it's right for you and your goals I'll leave a link to it in the description box down below so that's it for this one guys thanks so much for watching don't forget to leave me a thumbs up if you enjoyed the video subscribe if you haven't already and I'll see you guys all here in the next one