Ahhh, good ol’ leg day. You either love it or hate it, and leg day is skipped by many going to the gym. Skipping leg day can cause you to miss out on a lot of potential benefits that will help you achieve your goals. Even if you are doing cardio-focused workouts, you should be strength training your legs. Now you don’t have to go crazy dedicating an entire workout to strength train legs. Adding a couple leg exercises such as squats, lunges, glute kickbacks, band walks and others will help in a number of areas.
Burning Calories
Strength training your legs will help burn additional calories quickly! When you strength train your legs, you are now training some of the largest muscle groups in your body. This results in more energy expenditure, higher heart rates, and more calorie burn. So if you want to lose weight, never skip leg day.
Build Even More Muscle
When strength training, we know that we are building muscle and muscle size. The reason this happens though is because you are releasing testosterone and other hormones. When you skip leg day, you may not be seeing the results you would like though. Strength Training your legs means that you will be working out larger muscle groups that will cause a release of more testosterone and other hormones. This will also help in recovery of other muscles, building size, and becoming tone.
Balance
Leg day will keep your body balanced and help avoid those chicken legs from only training your upper body. It will also help train other muscle fibers making other areas of fitness become easier. If you are a runner or like to do cardio, strength training your legs will help make your stride more effective, especially climbing those hills.
So to simply put it, NEVER SKIP LEG DAY!
Written by GUADS staff member Patrick with contributions from www.bodybuilding.com
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