10 Reasons Why You Should Never Skip Leg Day

If you train in a commercial gym, you probably have noticed by now that most people work out every muscle apart from their legs. Many aspiring bodybuilders seem to forget that their legs are actually a part of their body, leading to them developing matchstick legs. Here we give you 10 reasons why you should train them so you can fully unlock your muscle building potential:

1. Legs Are The Foundation Of Strength

Having strong legs will allow you to jump higher, become faster and improve athletic performance. Even if you don?t play a sport, building muscle in your legs can help with everyday tasks. This can vary from packing up and moving from one apartment to another, pushing the car out of the snow or lifting heavier shopping bags up the stairs.

2. Working Legs Gives You Abs

Many of the muscles in your upper legs originate in the same area as your lower abdomen. So when you train legs, you?re forcing your midsection to become tighter and tighter. However, many professional bodybuilders prefer to stick to lunges, squats and deadlifts rather than doing ab exercises.

3. Stay Proportional

As we mentioned at the beginning of the article, there?s nothing worse than having a huge top half and then little twig legs on the bottom. Firstly, it looks plain ridiculous and more importantly, it can be dangerous to have such a major muscular imbalance. The lower body should be twice as strong as your top half. If not, you are making yourself extremely prone to leg injuries.

4. Get A Nice Butt For The Ladies

Most of guys out there ? if not all of us ? like to focus on our chest and guns in the mirror after an intense workout. However, girls tend to be more attracted to a cute, muscular butt. Therefore by doing heavy lifting with your glutes you will help build tight muscle mass and keep it perky for years to come.

5. Build Mental Toughness

Training legs isn’t an easy task ? anybody can go to the gym can do upper body all day. However, doing heavy squats and deadlifts takes some serious willpower due to the sheer amount of weight you?re lifting.

The day after also builds character as it can often be painful to walk, especially when it comes to going up stairs. Each time you train legs, you know that the next day will be as brutal as the last training session, but you do it regardless. This helps build a powerful amount of mental strength.

6. Increase Growth Hormone And Testosterone

Many scientific studies have proven that doing squats and deadlifts are a great way to encourage the release of growth hormone and testosterone. If your main aim is to build muscle fast, then you should always be looking to naturally increase your growth hormone and testosterone levels. These hormones play a key role in the reproduction of muscle and bone tissue.

7. Stronger Legs = Stronger Upper Body

Movements such as deadlifts, squats and lunges will train your entire body in a way that standard upper body exercises cannot. Even though they are lower body workouts, they still will help build an abundance of upper body strength.

8. You?ll Lose Fat

Studies have shown that heavy weight resistance training vastly increases our metabolic rates, resulting in a ton of calories being lost. The research also discovered that they stayed high for hours after the gym, meaning the athlete was still burning fat throughout the day. So get off the treadmill and start squatting already!

9. You Can Eat What You Want Afterwards

Believe or not, but after a leg day you can eat practically whatever you want. This is because heavy weight training improves our body?s insulin sensitivity and the rate we can absorb glucose. In other terms, eating a juicy burger with homemade fries will be absorbed efficiently, won?t be stored as fat, and will aid in muscle repair.

10. Improve Your Cardio Conditioning

Training legs will help develop your fast-twitch muscle fibers in a way running or cycling won?t be able to. Include a bit of both in your routine and you?ll see how much better you get at sports and how your overall fitness improves.