Weight Lifting for the Lower Body
In lifting circles, lower body training is often what separates the serious lifter from the dabbler. And there's good reason for this – Your legs are your muscular powerhouses, the absolute foundation for overall strength and muscular development.
In fact,your legs should actually carry the majority of your lean muscle mass! If you arent training your legs, you are missing out on working the majority of your body.
So, why train the legs? What are the benefits?
For strength – either specific strength for competitive athletes, or just functional strength in general – lower body training is an absolute essential. The most fundamental movement in any athletic pursuit is hip extension. This is the act of extending the hip joint so that the back and upper thigh are in alignment. The hamstrings and gluteals are prime movers in the act of hip extension, and it's common to almost any athletic activity you care to name. Sprinting, throwing, climbing, jumping, martial arts, football, rugby – they all require strong and powerful hip extension. It's the absolute core of any full-bodied athletic movement in fact.
And how do you develop hip extension? Primarily through the "big lifts" such as squats and deadlifts, and secondarily through power or ballistic movements such as the olympic lifts or kettlebell swings.
If all you did for a year was squats, for example – training in a strength-producing protocol (3x5, 5x5... etc), and steadily adding weight to the bar over time – you would develop phenomenal amounts of strength that surpassed most of your peers who weren't on a similar program.
From my personal experience, this kind of steady routine confers phenomenal athletic gains. I took my squat from 80kx x 5 to 120kg x 5 over the course of a few months, and took up brazilian jiu jitsu half way through. In BJJ, there's a position where you wrap your legs around your opponents body in order to trap him in your "guard". He must pass your guard by breaking your legs open, and you must try to get hold of a limb while he's trying, in order to pull a submission move.
By the time I reached 120x5 (which took no more than 5-6 months), I had an absolutely iron-vice-like "guard" that no one in my class could pass. The guys who had been at it for more than a year than me couldnt even break it, despite massively superior levels of skill. I could stalemate out any game, if I got a tight guard wrapped around them ( I couldnt always submit them, but that's another issue!).
So just a few months of a basic barbell exercise propelled me to the top levels of strength in my class, conferring a massive advantage and enabling me to compete with guys who would otherwise have easily beaten me.
This gives you some idea of the absolute raw power of good lower body training. The same holds for muscular development, too – if your goal is to add pounds and pounds of muscle mass, you're only really going to do it if you have a progression on some sort of "big lift" like squats are deadlifts in your program. The potential for the legs to grow, the amount of growth hormone and testosterone that leg training releases, and the bodies tendency to grow "in proportion" mean that leg training is absolutely key to overall muscular size.
Put your time in "under the bar", and you'll be rewarded with phenomenal gains, and surpass peers who arent serious about lower body exercises.
