Your legs are your powerhouse muscles; they are your largest muscles and the most difficult to workout at home because of the extensive use they get from everything else you do in life that involves moving around.
Get The Most Out Of Your Legs
Your legs are the source of a lot of power and strength, but also can be the source of a lot of pain… mainly from tight joins and stiff hamstrings (which causes certain types of lower back pain), so when doing leg exercises at home you want to focus on flexibility, range of motion and continual resistance to get the most of these at home workouts.
You’ll want to warm-up your legs and hips by running in place for 20 reps, Duck-Unders and Step-Overs. These exercises will get the blood flowing to your legs, and loosen up your hips.
The Exercises
Now that you’re nice and warmed-up, you can begin the exercises. In the gym, the Squat is the granddaddy of leg exercises, but without a barbell and a weight rack you might be wondering what leg exercises at home can you do to tone and strengthen your legs?
By using your body weight, the leg exercise at home that achieves the best results is the Single Leg Squat. It’s an unusual exercise, but is highly effective. You’ll want to do 3 to 4 sets of 12 reps in each set (note: one set equals doing 12 reps for each leg).
In addition, Single Leg Squats helps increase your balance, leg strength and leg muscle endurance. A variant on the Single Leg Squat, is the Ski Squat.
You do this by standing with your back against the wall, then bend your knees to a half-squat, hold the position for 5 to 10 second, then lower down another 2 inches, hold, drop another 2 inches, and hold (your thighs should be parallel to the floor at this point).
Then you want to drop 2 more inches, hold, and drop the final 2 inches—at which point your knees should be complete bent. Hold there for 5 to 10 seconds, then stand back up. That’s only one set.
You’ll want to do 3 sets of 10 reps; be sure to add about 5 second at each hold position in each subsequent workout… that’s how you increase your intensity; which isn’t the same as increasing poundage, but it’s the next best thing.
If you want a serious challenge, then do Single Leg Ski Squats, not only does this double the weight intensity on each leg, it’s critical to keep your hips parallel to the floor.
Another similar leg toning exercise is the Single Leg Dead-Lift. Your goal is to develop enough balance to do an entire set without having your nonworking foot touching the ground once. This exercise also develops the muscles in your ankles and sole of your foot.
Other quadriceps/leg toning exercises are the Y Squat and Lunges. These are two other high intensity leg toning exercises that you can do in your home or in a hotel room, and get the burn you need to know that you’re affecting your muscles, raising your heart-rate (and therefore burning calories) and increasing your flexibility.
When doing Y Squats to maximize the burn, you should take about 10 seconds to do each repetition; five second down and five seconds up.
If you do have dumbbells, then you have to use these when doing Lunges to build the strength around your knees. When doing your lunges, you can move across the room or stay stationary—either proper form is a must to get to best workout and to avoid injury.
A recommended variant on the Lunge, is the Prisoner Lunge. You do this by locking your arms behind your head, like you were a prison on a long march. This forces you to focus on your balance during the exercise.
If you want more or different exercise suggestions on how to design a leg toning routine at home check out Turbulence Training Program, a program designed to help you reach your weight loss goals while working out at home.
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