The Mass-Building Leg Workout Routine

When you’re going into the gym to do leg day, you need to know exactly what you’re going to do. Just so happens that I have a suggestion for your next leg day plan – do this workout routine, get a shake and go home with an improvement. When you want to pack on as much muscle as possible on your legs, you need to challenge your leg muscles at the very beginning of the workout.

This means that you’re going to do the heaviest weights at the beginning, from a number of different angles as well as with a consistent volume, meaning you’re going to do a lot of sets and reps and end your sets with muscle failure.

When you’re doing leg presses, changing the position of the foot will help you activate a number of different leg muscles, with small differences in their recruitment. If you do your leg presses with your feet high up on the sled, the focus is shifted from your quads to your hamstrings and glutes. This is because your hip flexion/extension is increased. Furthermore, your knee bend shouldn’t be deprived of its depth, which means the knee should get to a 90-degree angle. If you’re doing your exercises with a lot of weight, you’ll limit the recruitment of your hams and glutes, which will leave you lacking. Make sure you’re not doing your single-joint movements until you’ve done all other exercises beforehand unless you’re on a pre-exhaust routine.

This workout routine is based on a reverse-pyramid protocol, which will let you do more sets before your muscles fail. Your rep target will go up with time, but make sure to drop your weight as it does. This routine will activate four of your muscle groups – your quads, calves, hamstrings and glutes. If you want to make it shorter, cut the calves or hams exercises, or maybe both of them. If you do this, make sure to do your calves and hams another day – don’t just leave them out!

Some very important notes before we get to the routine:
1. Warm-up reps are important – do them whenever you need them, but don’t do them to muscle failure, obviously.
2. Make sure you pick a weight that lets you get to muscle failure in the number of reps that you plan to do.
3. When you reach your 1-2 heaviest sets of any given exercise, get a spotter and do a few forced reps – it’ll help you.