This time of year is busy and if you keep finding yourself bumping leg day to ‘tomorrow’, exercise scientist, Dr. Milo Wolf, has shared two leg workouts in a recent YouTube video that you’ll struggle to make excuses for. He says they're stupidly simple, relatively easy and time-efficient, and will only roughly take you 10 minutes, each.
We know what you’re thinking ‘That sounds too good to be true’, but Dr. Wolf says: “You don’t need brutal high-volume sessions to build a decent set of legs.” Instead, the workout he recommends is minimum effective dose training, where you focus on doing the least amount of work possible to build muscle and improve strength. He also refers to a study, which reveals that as few as four sets per muscle group is enough to elicit hypertrophy, and doing both these workouts makes sure you tick this box.
You’ve only got three exercises to get through (yes, just three in both workouts). However, the aim is to perform two hard working sets for each, either to failure or very close to failure with two reps left in reserve. With only a 90-120-second rest between each set, you’ll blast through these workouts in no time and they’ll hit your major lower body muscles. Here’s what Dr. Wolf recommend:
Leg day 1
- Assisted pistol squats – 2 x as many reps as possible
- Seated leg curls – 2 x 8-12 reps
- Seated leg press calf raises – 2 x 5-8 reps
Leg day 2
- Romanian deadlift – 2 x 5-8 reps
- Sissy squats – 2 x as many reps as possible
- Seated leg press calf raises – 2 x 8-12 reps
Simple, yet effective. “Building big legs doesn’t have to mean doing super high volume training all the time. If all you want is decent, respectable legs, this is a great way to approach it,” says Dr. Wolf. Give them a go the next time you tell yourself you don't have time to train.
