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In today's episode, we talk about developing your legs.

To be more specific, we talk about working the quads and the hamstrings.

Best exercises, reps, sets, function, all that good stuff.

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All right, today we're going to talk about developing the muscles of the upper legs.

Specifically the quads and the hamstrings.

Very big muscles, very important muscles for lots of different reasons.

Today we're gonna talk about their function.

We're gonna talk about reps, sets, all that great stuff if you're looking to develop amazing legs.

You know, it's interesting because the lower body in general, but you're talking about the upper legs, so important for athletic performance, So important for athletic performance.

No, you need or just just performance in general you need Strong well-developed leg muscles and then this translates to aesthetics all the now I know that there's a lot of especially guys out there that will skip leg day, because you can hide your legs, right, with pants.

But when you expose them, everybody will, by the way, guys, every girl will tell you this.

If you get down to your skivvies and your legs look like you don't work them out and you have a well-developed upper body, not only is it, doesn't look right, it's a turn off.

Because we primally know that this person doesn't have good function.

Well, to your athletic point, I mean, it's really where you're going to generate all your power.

I mean, your legs are responsible for driving all of that explosive movement and getting your body to do all these crazy athletic moves necessary to be a great athlete.

you guys think, I feel like this has changed a lot, the amount of guys that don't train legs.

When I was a teenager and lifting weights, there was like 1 friend that trained his legs.

Where now when I think of like all my male friends, now I don't know if this is somewhat of a bias because I've gotten older and what I do for a career, I'm centered around mostly coaches and trainers and with that, so maybe there's definitely a bias with me, that's why I'm asking.

But it feels like it's the opposite now where most everybody I know, he trains legs, but maybe I have 1 friend who's a leg skipper, but most do not.

I would say skipping legs still happens, but way less.

think it's because of the popularity of the barbell movements,

like CrossFit really, that's another thing I think CrossFit did a really good job is getting the bros

And there's lots of memes, you know, when the meme stuff started happening and the internet kind of became a thing.

Justin's been campaigning for bringing back

You know, back to the athletic point, so just to hammer that home, people think, oh yeah, you gotta run, that's why you need powerful legs.

Throw a ball, try not to use your legs, throw a punch, try not to use your legs.

You're gonna have a, you're gonna generate a fraction of the power or you're gonna be able to throw a ball a fraction of the distance without having good coordination and strength from the lower body.

a terrible example, but I was just thinking about like treading water in a pool, right?

And then you're trying to throw a ball or trying to throw a punch.

Like you have no, no grounding, no anchoring there to really like, you know, establish the whole rest of your body, which produces a lot of force through these muscles in your legs.

By the way, I will also say this, more back pain comes from weak legs than a weak back.

A lot of people think back pain comes from a weak back.

Oftentimes it comes from a weak lower body and then the back has to do work that it can't support.

think that that was a major contributor to my low back pain.

Remember I talked about having low back pain for a really long time.

I think I had a weak lower leg from not squatting or doing any of that stuff when I was a teenager.

And it wasn't until first I started squatting and then I started deep squatting, did that completely go away?

think it has a lot to do just with weakness in my legs.

And so the lower back was overcompensating a lot in a lot of my movements.

When you bend over to pick something up or you're doing stuff where your back is active, the lower body is what's supporting it.

And if the lower body can't do it, then the back has to do most of the work.

And this is why you see lots of back injuries.

There's actually weakness and immobility or mobility issues in the lower body.

And then of course, core and low back plays a role.

But if you have bad back problems and you don't strengthen the lower body, the chances of you really fixing the root cause are actually quite slim.

You know, the irony around the young teenage boy skipping legs too is that, I mean, at least if you can identify as the insecure skinny boy who wanted to build and be bigger I mean how how fixated were you on the scale and how fixated were you on just being bigger in general

Oh my god like I mean I have a why I don't think I could ever get under 200 pounds anymore.

It's just because my legs, my legs are so much thicker and heavier now than they were when I was a teenager that I don't think I could get my weight down because of how thick and big they are compared to when I was younger.

And yet that was the thing I was so insecure about as a teenage boy was being this skinny looking light kid, you know?

You know what's funny is I've talked about this on the show.

There was that summer, I wanna say between sophomore and junior here, maybe in high school, might've been that year or that summer where I gained, I don't know, close to like 14 or 15 pounds.

Which is, That's when I squatted and deadlifted.

And I remember that all my pants stopped fitting me.

I all of a sudden I couldn't wear any of my jeans because my legs and my butt had grown.

And that's where a lot of the weight, I mean, I guarantee I had 14 pounds, 10 of it probably went to my lower body.

And even you start like barbell squatting, like what that does for your upper body where I saw gains, like in my shoulders and my chest, I'm like, what?

Like just from adding that in is another, uh, you know, big lift.

Not to go off on a tangent, but a lot of people don't know this that there is a strange limiting factor to how much muscle you can build that has to do with the rest of your body.

So if the rest of your body is very underdeveloped, the part of your body that you do train will only go so far.

For example, they'll have studies where somebody will have a leg that's immobilized, like in a cast, let's say, and they'll train the leg that can move, or they do have people who don't train you the leg.

The people who train the leg that they can move lose less muscle in the immobilized leg.

So there's like this interesting communication that goes on, but it makes sense because your body doesn't necessarily think in terms of muscle groups, but rather as a whole because when you move, you use all of them.

I think a lot of that has to do too, or at least I speculate a lot of that has to do with the CNS and what you miss out on by not squatting and deadlifting.

And I love your, and this is why I've always loved your analogy with the amplifier and speakers when we speak of our central nervous system being the amplifier, our speakers being your muscles.

And you put so much emphasis on building the muscles or getting big speakers, but little effort towards really developing, strengthening, and building a CNS.

And I mean, what builds the CNS, the ability to fire and be strong like a deadlift and a squat.

And I think that is where the, like there's everybody know, or not everybody knows, a lot of people have heard that if you are stuck on your bench and you can't get your bench up to build your legs up and it goes up.

I think that has, even though you can make the case for leg drive supporting some of that, I think it has less to do with leg drive and then it's the overall development and improvement of the CNS firing that carries over into that.

Oh, if you don't, if you were like, let's say you just love to bench press, you never work out your legs and you're trying to get your bench press, grow up, start squatting.

And now in the fitness space, When we talk about mobility, people think of like, you know, being able to get in weird positions and flexibility and twisting all that stuff, but in the most literal sense, mobility as a human in the modern world is you're able, you're able to go places, you're able to get up and walk and move.

And when you get older, as you get older, 1 of the biggest contributors to loss of independence is your loss of lower body mobility, even more so than upper body mobility, your inability to get up and get back down or falls because you lose strength in your lower body are tremendous.

I mean, I have older people in my family and you watch what happens, them sitting down and just getting up off the couch, even having to get different types of toilet seats and handles so they can sit down and use the bathroom.

And if they fall down on the ground, their legs aren't strong enough to get themselves back up.

Like in its most literal sense, strong legs give you great mobility, or at least you'll be able to maintain it for the rest of your life.

So the case is essentially, we're making the case that leg development is extremely important, Extremely important.

And then from an aesthetic standpoint, weak looking legs means you probably look weak overall.

Athletes know this, but I think the average person knows this just inherently.

You see somebody and you can see their whole body.

And if you see a huge contrast between upper and lower body, doesn't look right.

Now for those that are training legs, what comes to mind is like some of the biggest mistakes that people make.

Like what do you, like the people that are training legs, what are some of the biggest mistakes that you would recall?

Well, I would say not doing the best exercises.

And then, you know, not treating a lower body or any exercise in general, but specifically lower body ones like squats as a skill, but rather I'm going to do these until I get tired.

Um, To make squats and deadlifts and lunges and all these great exercise for lower body effective, you have to perfect the skill of those exercises.

Number 2 treating those exercises like a skill getting good at them.

that you could perform the wall and then 3 I would say Neglecting the hamstrings.

Yeah pieces of equipment that address the quads and people don't see as many hamstring exercises.

And I think most people neglect posterior chain as it is.

And the hamstring still is a really big muscle.

And when you want like shapely, thick, good looking legs, like developing the backside is as important as the front.

Well, and to that point, even I feel like hip-hinging movements don't get a lot of attention to your everyday average person in regards to like a squat.

Like a squat's a little bit more known, but to really do a good hip-hinging movement and add load to that takes a bit more education.

And then, you know, from an athletic standpoint, hamstring injuries are very common because you see an imbalance with quad strength.

But I would say, I mean, God, how many times more often do hamstrings get injured than quads?

And so it's definitely 1 of the more common ones for athletes.

Now to be fair, a barbell squat done properly develops the whole leg, but you want to do some exercises that kind of target the hamstrings, hip hinging real important.

Besides the glutes, the hamstrings are probably 1 of the most important muscles for back health because it helps you hinge at the hips.

And if those are weak, then it's all gonna be lumbar spine.

Now quadriceps, quad meaning 4, they named it that because there's 4 heads to the quadriceps.

There's the vastus lateralis, vastus medialis, intermedius, basically outer, inner, you know, kind of middle quad.

Then you have the rectus femoris, which kind of goes down the middle and covers the whole thing.

And really the function of the quads is to extend the knee.

So if you bend your knee and then kick it out, that's what the quads do essentially.

The kneecap kind of floats over a joint on your femur And really strong, good, healthy quads keeps that kneecap from grinding in 1 area or another, or from popping out to left or to right.

In fact, when I dislocated my kneecap to the outside, yeah, same thing.

Yeah, I was just going to point that out.

That is so much that you could injure your knee sometimes, and the quad will help stabilize that.

Yeah, so when I dislocated my kneecap when I was a kid, my left 1, and it popped out to the outside, the physio told me to strengthen the teardrop muscle of the quad.

And it is very important for stabilizing.

I couldn't figure out why I didn't feel like anything was that wrong when I tore my ACL and MCL.

Because, and the doctor, this was right at the height of like me building a lot of muscle.

I was pretty muscular and playing basketball and then I tore it.

And the initial injury hurt and then of course the next day when all the swelling hit in, but mechanically I felt okay.

I didn't really feel like something, even though we did the X-ray.

Yeah, and I always remember asking like, man, really, I tore it?

And he's like, no, no, you definitely tore it.

The reason why you feel okay is you've done such a good job of developing all the surrounding muscles that support this floating joint.

And so even though you're missing important ligaments right now, you've got like some good support on it.

That's how crucial it can be to build and develop muscle around those knees.

So think about that as we age, just protecting the knees.

Knees are some of the most common surgeries that you hear out there in the elderly.

And so that's another thing that's so important about building those quadriceps and building those legs in general is because it supports that joint.

And that joint is 1 of the most common joints that you hear people getting surgery on.

And now, although I did say it extends the knee, people might think, oh, the best exercises are ones that just extend the knee.

Not true, like most muscles, they develop best when they're trained with other muscles in what are called compound lifts.

We'll get to that a little later in the episode.

But I just wanted to say that, because once I mentioned the function, I think sometimes, oh, I'm just gonna do exercises.

And it does work the quad, but it's not gonna develop the quads nearly to the degree or with the same functional strength as other exercises.

You have 3 muscles, the bicep femoris, the semi-membranosus, semi-tendinosis, and these muscles flex the knee, meaning they bend the knee back, so it's like you're trying to kick yourself with your heel, right?

That's what that muscle does, and it flexes the hip, or sorry, extends the hip, I should say.

So it's like if you bend over and stand up, the hamstrings help stand you up.

And they also involve some rotation of the hip.

Now, most people when they think hamstring exercises, they think leg curls, which is true, but you're missing out on a lot of development by just focusing on leg curls.

Hip, I would say, really extending at the hips is where you're going to get most of the development of the hamstring muscles.

So let's get to some of the best exercises.

Now there's going to be carry over with some of these exercises, because some of these exercises work both the quadriceps and the hamstrings, the king of all exercises, which is, you know, it's widely known as the king of all exercise is a lower body exercise.

It's known as the king of all exercises because of its effect on overall muscle mass performance, strength, you know, when you get good at it, protecting the back and the knees and the hips and just functional.

It's 1 of the best exercises you do period end of story, but it's a phenomenal quad and hamstring exercise.

But I would say it's more quad dominant than hamstring dominant.

Yeah, no, it's just if you're trying to develop your quads, this 100% has to be in your arsenal

And back to your original point, not only squatting, but continuing to treat it as a skill and get better at it because that's 1 of the beautiful things about the squat is the reason why I think the benefits continue and continue on for so long and it's so much more than almost any other exercise is because the difficulty of getting good at it and you're continuously seeing gains where let's say we do an exercise like you mentioned leg extensions, the body is going to adapt to that movement relatively quick because of the simplicity of it.

You sit down in a machine, you're stable, you're supported, it's on a track, all you're doing is extending the knee out.

Very, very little skill involved and even though it's stimulating the quadricep really well, it's not very long before the body starts to adapt.

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2115: Leg Building Masterclass