The Only 3 Leg Exercises I Still Perform After 6+ Years of Working Out
Not the leg press, dumbbell lunges, or leg extensions
When I started learning Muay Thai, I lost all interest in lifting weights—my 6-year-old sweetheart.
While I stripped my upper-body routine to its bare essentials, I couldn’t do the same for my lower because:
- While leg strength and power are crucial for generating thunderous shin kicks.
- Thigh musculature and endurance are necessary for absorbing kick damage — and the recoil of punches.
Strength, muscle, flexibility, endurance, and power — the challenge was to tick all those boxes.
After much research, reading anecdotes, and experimenting, I finalized 3 exercises.
Along with sub-variations (which I’ll talk about), these 3 will build legs that look like anatomic specimens yet fire like hydraulic pistons.
As Van Damme famously puts it — “A pair of legs engineered to defy the laws of physics.”
The Most Complete Leg Builder on The Planet
For the first 3 years of my weight training journey, I had chicken legs — no amount of leg pressing and dumbbell lunging helped.
That’s when barbell back squats came into the picture — by the time I built up to a 315 lb PR, my twig legs had morphed into racehorse thighs.
- No other leg exercise allows such a high overload — while forcing you to use deep ROM and good form. RIP 500 LB 1-inch leg pressers!
- Through subtle changes in bar positioning, stance width, and foot angles, you can target a host of different leg muscles.
- Thanks to the barbell’s straightforward way of adding weight, progressive overload becomes easy.
- It’s bloody fun. Period.
As with any heavy compound exercise, master the form before stacking up the weights — even then, always warm your way up in pyramid sets from the empty barbell.
Doing 3 to 4 working sets of 4 to 12 reps with high intensity is enough to toast your quads, glutes, and hamstrings.
Also, here are a few ways to milk the most out of this amazing exercise:
- Slow down the descent, pause at the bottom, and explode on your way up: This will get you straining for 4 reps with your normal 8-rep PR.
- Try going Ass-To-Grass (ATG): Popularized by Olympic weightlifters, this is a squat style where you go all the way down—only if you have the flexibility.
- The 20-rep breathing squat: Not for the faint of heart. The idea? Load up your 12-rep set weight and shoot for 20 reps. When you attempt this, DON’T DO more than one set.
- Drop-sets and rest-pause. Both help you push past failure — while you drop the weight to 60 or 80% in the former, you wait 15 to 30 seconds before resuming in the latter.
A Joint-Safe Way to Build Juicy Hamstrings and Glutes
I love Romanian deadlifts — they’re one of the best posterior chain builders on the planet.
But with the strain of back squats and Muay Thai training, the total fatigue was too much — that’s where dumbbell hyper-extensions jumped to the rescue:
- Because of the leaning body angle, there’s constant tension on your hamstrings and lower back.
- The same reason allows you to get better results using much lesser weights — the 25 LB dumbbells compared to the 90 LB ones for RDLs in my case.
- Thanks to the comfortable machine setup, you can hyper-extend your lower back to really squeeze those glutes — and get a weirdly relaxing effect.
The best part yet? No need to painstakingly set up the deadlift platform and perform a million warmup sets.
3 sets of 15 to 30 reps are amazing to burn out your posterior chain — focus on excellent form, controlled descents, and hyper-explosive ascent.
Leave the gym limping with pleasurable soreness.
A Super-Functional Calf-Builder
The trick in explosive kicking is pivoting your entire body weight on the ball of your foot — as fast as possible.
That’s where the single-leg standing calf raise reigns:
- Thanks to its unilateral nature, you can even out muscle imbalances and improve stability.
- Since the bodyweight version itself is challenging, you can do this anywhere — even when discussing philosophy with your gym buddy.
- The motion is incredibly functional — be it when tiptoeing to the cookie jar as a kid or peeking over the top cupboard as a grown adult.
To emphasize explosiveness, I slow down the descent, explode the way up, and hold at the peak contraction of the calf.
3 serious sets of 12 to 20 reps at the end of your leg workout should more than suffice.
Bonus: Nothing Will Build Leg Explosiveness More than This
While the aforementioned three 3 exercises form the bread and butter of my leg routine, I occasionally allow myself to experiment.
A marvelous exercise I’ve stumbled upon and incorporate occasionally is the jumping weighted lunge:
- The jumping element forces your legs to generate peak power.
- This exertion also gets your heart rate soaring — and almost acts as cardio.
By adding a side-to-side motion while jumping, you can inject more athleticism into this exercise.
Before you enthusiastically try this, master weighted walking lunges and bodyweight jumping lunges first.
Don’t use this as a staple — rather, use this as a leg-day finisher to burn out your muscles and get that heart pumping blood.
Want another excellent alternative?
All-out sprinting — 30 seconds on, 2 minutes off.
