Here I attempt to explain the importance of balance in your weight-training regimen. Ignoring your legs can have consequences even worse than attracting furtive snickers at the beach.
What is it about newbie weight trainers, especially us guys, and totally ignoring our legs? The result is laughable, and sometimes tragically gross: A pumped, chiseled, sexy torso and arms that are attached to …skinny, malnourished-looking legs.
An otherwise "normal" set of lower limbs can look downright emaciated when mismatched with a well-trained upper body. Some gym rats readily acknowledge their shortcomings down under and attempt to disguise their sad saplings by refusing to wear shorts.
This neg-leg-gedful approach might be due to lack of discipline - at the end of a hardcore week of tossing around the iron, perhaps you feel too exhausted to muster up the considerable psychic and physiological resources needed to put on a worthwhile leg workout.
Or maybe it's vanity: when we do arms, chest or shoulders, we get instant visual feedback in that most wonderful of tools, the Mirror. And I might add, doing those things we get instant gratification. Who doesn't love seeing their upper half swollen with blood and hormones both during and after a particularly beastly barbell blast? But with legs, for several reasons, the pump effect is less pronounced, and therefore less psychologically rewarding.
For many of us, doing legs is like when we were told to eat vegetables as a kid. You "know" it's good for you, on some theoretically sound but emotionally unappealing level; and so you fail to see why you really must do/eat them right now.
The veggies must wait for another entry. But today, not only will I help you to convince yourself that training your legs is "good for you," (if you don't accept that premise already); You will conclude this article in such a high state of desire to train your legs like a maniac, a state of leg lust, if you will, that you'll want to run out and make it your very next workout.
So without further ado, here are two highly compelling reasons you want to work your legs:
1) Your legs are a huge blood pump. Your quads, hams, glutes and gastrocnemius (calf) muscles are, as a group, the most powerful cluster of muscles in your body. They have to be, as they are the ones primarily responsible for lugging your bulk around all day. Improve their efficiency, and you thereby improve the efficiency of your entire body, including the "beach muscles" like your arms and pecs. Bigger and stronger legs mean you get fresh blood and oxygen more quickly to everywhere else. On a pure, functional strength and fitness basis, the vast majority of experts on anatomy and physiology recommend strenuous exercise involving the legs, before anything else. Fred "Dr. Squat" Hatfield, one of the most knowledgeable sports science experts of all time, has gone so far as to call the squat the best exercise that a human can do. Bottom line: Train your legs hard and the rest of you will get even buffer.
2) Aesthetic symmetry. Back in my days on the amateur bodybuilding stage, I couldn't count all the times some otherwise perfect Adonis of a specimen would lose the Big Trophy, because a smaller, less visually arresting guy simply had more proportionate legs. Symmetry is one of the most primal things we humans pick up on in terms of how we deem others' attractiveness. Some people genetically have small calves, and that's ok. The point is, develop them to the best of your ability. Just about everyone has the capability to get their hams and quads looking decent and on par with the rest of their body. If not, it just looks silly. I can say this, because I used to be top-heavy myself.
3) Balance, Pt. 2: The Whoa! Effect. If you really want to impress the opposite sex - or make the same sex jealous - just present yourself as the total package. It's pretty easy to focus on just one aspect of ourselves to the exclusion of everything else and make it stand out in particular. But that simply makes one freakish. Some pop and movie stars are known for having big breasts, big bootys or a long, thick… trail of commas and zeros in their bank accounts. Those of us who devote attention to every aspect of our physiques however, and make them look good, are considered masters.
When you do this as well, you'll find that a sense of physical balance seeps into other realms of your being, such as how you think and feel. You will feel confident and comfortable knowing that you look in balance. You will have no body parts to hide and you won't get unduly sweaty when the weather turns warm because you must wear pants. Instead of feeling exposed with no pants on, you may find yourself seeking opportunities to show off your sculpted, hard-won wheels. Whipping your legs into shape is truly a win-win situation. So if you're not doing them already, or you're just working them out haphazardly, c'mon, step up and do something that you know you'll thank yourself for later.
FROM OUR SPONSORS:
