Your Comprehensive guide to designing a lower body workout for strength, size, and power

Let’s talk about training legs! Love them or hate them, you absolutely have to train them. Whatever your goals, having a solid foundation of strength, muscle and power through your lower half is going to serve you the rest of your life. 

But how do we make sure we’re covering all of our bases when it comes to training our lower body for strength, size, and power? Let’s go over the essentials. 

1) Start your workouts with plyometrics. These can serve as a general warm up, while at the same time improving your tendon stiffness, a quality essential for anyone who runs or wants to do anything athletic in their lives. Plyometrics are incredibly underrated for longevity as well. Imagine catching yourself from a fall; it’s your ability to react and coordinate that movement at a moment’s notice that can save you from a broken hip. 

2) Pick a balance of compound exercises that target your quads, hamstrings, and glutes. Squats and lunge variations are going to be your best bet for quads and glutes. Deadlift variations, romanian deadlift variations and 45 degree hip extensions are awesome for hamstrings and glutes. 

3) Balance out your compound exercises with movements that isolate your quads, hamstrings or glutes. Leg extensions, sissy squats, and reverse nordic curls are great movements that isolate your quads. Leg curls are essential for the hamstrings. And bridging movements like the hip thrust are great for isolating the glutes. 

4) Superset your compound movements with isolation movements of the opposite muscle group. Supersets are absolutely essential for making your time in the gym more efficient. If you have two hours to spend in the gym every day feel free to take your time, but if you only have an hour two or three times per week you need to make the most out of that time. Superset your squats with a movement like hamstring curls so that your lower back and hips can rest while you are doing your hamstring curls. I don’t like supersetting compound movements back to back because they tend to take too much away from each other. 

5) Choose a rep range that is appropriate for the chosen movement. Most people tend to do better in the 4-8 rep range for heavy compounds and 10-14 for isolation movements, but this is not gospel. 

6) Get a balance of single leg and bilateral lifts throughout the week. You don’t need a perfect balance each workout, but over time you should include a couple single leg exercises to bias parts of your legs that don’t get worked as well when you have two legs working at the same time. 

7) Don’t forget to train your calves. If you don’t start with plyometrics, make sure you get some direct calf work in at the beginning of your workout. 

The following is the workout I did today on Monday, October 14. 

Warm up: Plyometrics 

Hops down and back + side to side 1 set 20 reps 

Split stance exchange leaps 1 set 20 reps 

Single leg jumps 1 set 10 reps per side 

A1) Deadlift 2 sets 4-8 reps 

 355# x 8, 5 

A2) Sissy squat 2 sets 6-10 reps 

 BW x 10, 8 

B1) Front squat (2 second pause in bottom)

 185# x 4, 3, 3

B2) Seated hamstring curl 

 95# x 15, 12