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, challenging
yourself to lift more. But always what your own body is meant to be handling. Not what
you think you should be, and bastardizing every, single rep along the way.
That is not the route to progress. The route to progress is consistent, good, high effort,
with good form. Our programs reinforce all that, guys. They're over at ATHLEANX.com.
In the meantime, if you've found the video helpful, and truthful leave your comments
and thumbs up below.
Let me know what you want me to cover here, and I'll do my best to do that for you in
the days, and weeks ahead. All right, see you soon.