Do THIS After Every Leg Workout | Leg & Booty Workout Finisher
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Today I’m gonna show you 1 circuit that you can try at the end of your next workout that’s gonna make your legs and glutes burn, reduce muscle imbalances between sides, and help you avoid injuries. As much as I want you to build your glutes, tone your thighs, and get super strong, I want you to do all that without hurting yourself.
If you are currently lifting heavy – awesome. If you’re currently doing compound lifts – things like squats, deadlifts, hip thrusts – even better. BUT if you’re frequently taking these to failure, maybe not so good – ESPECIALLY if you’re taking these big lifts to failure at the end of your workout!
As you move through a workout, your muscles fatigue. Even if you’re new-ish to working out, you can probably think of a time when you were walking for what felt like forever and you started dragging your feet, slumping forward, wanting a piggy back ride maybe. In other words – your muscles fatigue.
Now, there’s nothing inherently wrong with fatigue UNLESS it decreases your ability to perform. Going back to that walking example – what happens if you’re already tired, but you push yourself to do heavy squats to failure at the end of your workout? Chances are – your form is gonna break down, you’re going to start shifting the load to other muscle groups, and if you’re tired enough – you might start slumping and shift that load from your muscles more to your joints. Not good.
This is where our circuit comes in. The way this is gonna work is we will have three exercises:
Lying leg curl
Glute bridge
AND
Straight leg bridge
Each exercise hits the same muscle groups, but the lying leg curl will be the toughest whereas the straight leg bridge will be the easiest. The idea is that once you do as many reps as you can with the harder exercise, you’ll “drop” to the easier exercise and do this until you complete all three exercises to failure. I recommend using this drop set as the final circuit at the END of your workout. Remember – we don’t want to be fatigued before doing big heavy compound lifts.
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LYING LEG CURL
Now there’s two ways to do this – as I am here where I’m keeping my glutes squeezed to prevent my hips from moving up and down OR you can make it a more dynamic movement by bridging up as you curl your legs in. If you’d like to make this movement even tougher, you can do it like that.
Regardless of which variation you choose, you want to focus on keeping your hips level and keeping even pressure on each leg. I know it may look easy now, but staying balanced side to side while moving your legs forward and back is going to require a lot of control through your hamstrings and glutes.
GLUTE BRIDGE
Moving on to the glute bridge, here we’re removing the forward / back element and are instead just moving our hips up and down. So as compared to the first exercise where I was clenching my glutes while lengthening and contracting my hamstrings, here I’m clenching my hamstrings while lengthening and contracting my glutes.
I recommend taking as wide a stance as you can on the ball and again, focusing on keeping those hips level side to side
The smoother you can make this movement, the easier it will be to balance.
STRAIGHT LEG BRIDGE
As you can see – this exercise has the shortest range of motion out of all the exercises yet. This means less range of motion for us to control and as a result, less potential for injury. Again, I recommend taking a relatively wide stance or positioning with your legs and visualize squeezing the ball with the backs of your legs as you press up. This simple “squeezing” cue will help you flex slightly at the knee while externally rotating at the hip, allowing us to hit both the back of thigh hamstring muscles, as well as your glutes.
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There have been a couple studies released on the topic of training to failure recently. All in all – the consensus seems to be that training to failure will produce more fatigue, which can decrease performance in the following sets or workouts. My advice is to save failure training for the end of your workout and limit it to simpler exercises that you’re less likely to hurt yourself with.
If you found this video helpful, let me know by leaving me a comment in the comment section below!!
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