Home Leg Development..weight FREE!..??

[Rolling Elbow]

Hello friends..,

I like many people here, do not really have the time to pay for a gym membership. I currently train and work out at home with weights doing simple exercises, just enough to maintain shape and strength.

I have found however, that my leg development suffers because squats and other power movements for the legs cannot be acheived when you have nobody to spot you or when there is no smyth machine to assist you..

So who here has a good leg work out that will put on some mass on my chicken legs using "home" principals or work outs?!!

[Royal Dragon]

Hold your deep stances for 2-3 minutes each.
If you want, string a bunch together and hold each one for 2 minutes.
If you need a routine, Kung Fu Magazine sells a video called "Shaolin Temple Health exercise/ Shaolin Louhan Chi Kung" by Temple knights productions.


"IF" you can survuve the routine, your going to have legs of steel and be strong as H e l l !!!! :cool:

Royal Dragon

[Braden]

I wouldn't recommend a stance routine like what RD suggested if that's what your after. Just try doing squats with a lighter weight you can safely manage; you can get excellent gains with quite a light weight if you do it regularly and with proper form. You might also want to check out 'hindu squats', which are weightless, and pretty popular (although I haven't tried them myself). Check out www.mattfurey.com , or just search the net for info (or ask the people in the training forum here).

[Mr. Nemo]

If you get a cage or a certain type of squat rack, you should be able to do heavy squats safely without a spotter.

[Royal Dragon]

With dedicated practice, Stance training can and does give pretty impressive gains both in size, strength, and most notably muscular endurance.

[Braden]

There's alot of research that suggests that stance training done in isolation, like any isometric, will increase standing blood pressure, decrease innervation, vascularization, and cellular metabolism of the muscule, decrease contraction speed, and will not condition the joints and bones the way proper full-motion weight-bearing exercise will; and to boot, the gains in strength will be extremely range-dependant.

While this is just research, in my experience (having done a wide variety of these things) no amount of standing will give you what squats will - in a fraction of the time.

If he wants to do isometrics _in addition to_ a full-range, weight-bearing exercise, I'd say that would be great. If he wants to do a stance routine to learn about structure and relaxation, again I think that would be great. But if he wants something simple to work the muscles of his legs, I think the answer is clearly squats.

[Rolling Elbow]

Maybe you guys can suggest a short leg weight routine that has yielded good results?

with squats I know I can feel the whole muscles being engaged.., calves on the other hand are hard as hell to make grow. Are they also engaged in the standard squat?

[Shaolindynasty]

Body weight squats are good. I don't know about size gain but jumping squats are good for developing explosive movement. Also stick a staff across tha backs of 2 chairs and jump over them, this is also good for explosive movement.

For the Thighs I would suggest doing leg extensions and curls as a substitute if you can't do weighted squats. I used to like to do allot of drop sets for the quads.

For calves forget weights. Put the balls of your feet on some steps and then do them. I used to do 10 with the toes in, 10 with the toes out, and 10 regular all the way up the stairs. That's a calve routine my friend got from high school football coach.


Stance training is OK but personally I have found that body weight quats are better.

[kungfuyou]

one great excercise you can do to strengthen/train your legs is to do lunges. Basically what you do is to stand with your feet shoulder width apart. Take one foot, either right or left, depends on what you want to begin with,but lets' say right for now, and lunge that foot forward so that you extend forward placing that foot flat on the ground, but making sure that your knee does not go past your toes. Keep your back straight, and your left foot stays put, bending at the knee so it drops and barely touches the floor. To return to the original position, the foot that was lunged forward, push off with that foot, and start back at the original position.

To add to this, put a box in front of you and lunge onto this. If you can, fill some 1 gallon jugs of water, and hold them in each hand while doing this to add some weight.

Another variation to this is a walking lunge. Basically same movement, but instead of coming back to your original position, take your back foot up to meet your front foot, and "walk" to the next positions. Keeping your hands on your waist helps keep balance if you aren't holding the jugs of water.

Try to "walk" a set of ten in one direction, then pivot, and do another ten in the other.

[Royal Dragon]

There's alot of research that suggests that stance training done in isolation, like any isometric, will increase standing blood pressure, decrease innervation, vascularization, and cellular metabolism of the muscule, decrease contraction speed, and will not condition the joints and bones the way proper full-motion weight-bearing exercise will; and to boot, the gains in strength will be extremely range-dependant.

Reply]
Not sure I agree with this. First off, I was under the impression Isometics were a tension based exercise. the best descrition was that of standing in a doorway and pressing out on the frame with all your strength. This is NOT what goes on in a holdng posture, in fact holding postures are actually best done with as much relaxation as possible. The practitioner is suposed to relax and "Sink" into the posture.

Also the line about rasing blood pressure, I'm not sure that applys either. My waking heart rate is always on the low end of my scale when I do LOT's of posture holding routines, sugesting that blood pressure actually DROPS!! If what you said were true, it would move to the upper end of the scale.

I also don't undestand the whole reaction speed thing. I have alwayse used deep holing routines to boost my kicking abilitys because they loosen and SPEED my kicks signifcantly. If what you say is true, my kicks would slow down, tighten up and lose range of motion, NOT speed up and become easier and more powerful.

On the not condition joint thing, have you ever done stance routines???? If so you would not say this. Holding postures does as much for the jionts as the muscles, both in strength AND range of motion, AND they also build the bone too boot. You can actually FEEL this in a not to short amount of time.

Another plus is you don't have the high compression through motion effect as you do with a loaded exercise like squats. this prevent the "Grinding" like effect, and thus protects the cartillaige. For you to say that Stances don't build the jionts and bones shows your total lack of experiance on the subject.

On the range of motion thing, you really don't have that problem when holding full length routines as each posture works a slightly different aspect of the muscles range. This followed by moving through the routine in a seady motion without pausing covers the entire range of motion.

Wieghted squat like you say are good, but I think Chris's idea of useing polymetric exercises (Jumping over the staff) is also better because it builds the kind of explosive power a martial artists needs. You can increse the load by jumpng higher, or holding a wieghted medicine ball wile you do your jumps. Plus, you get the calf training and conditioning at the same time. This also has the advantage of not needing a spotter, which was the original question posted at the beginning of the thread.

RD

[Braden]

RE - I do flatfooted, medium-stance barbell squats and toe-raises.

The toe-raises really hit your calves. Like SD said, just put the balls of your feet parallel on the same step of some stairs. Raise your body up as high as it can go, then as low as it can go. Do it slow, inhale up, exhale down, and go as far as you can without hurting yourself. Again, like SD said - heels out = outer calf, heels in = inner calf, heels straight = main calf. You don't have to isolate like this, just doing main calf is fine, although you'll want to play with it to find out what you like. Unlike SD, I'd recommend throwing a barbell across your shoulders, or holding dumbbells in your hands when doing this. This is an exercise you can throw alot of sets and reps at (ie. alot of time at), so experiment to find out what works for you (weighted sets of 20-25 are a good rule of thumb, 2-3 sets of the main calf is the minimum; if you have the time, doing 2 sets of each of the 3 variations for a total of 6 sets is excellent). You WILL feel MASSIVE calf burn the next day if you haven't done these exercises before, so be sure to stretch and loosen them out afterwards.

For squats, just make sure you go slow, breath deep, long, and slow (too easy to let your lungs stagnate in squats), inhale down, exhale up, keep your head up, bend at the pelvis and not with the spine, don't let your knees poke forward past your toes or jut out or in, do 3 sets of 8-10 (2 sets minimum, 4 sets maximum, 12 reps maximum), and REALLY go thighs-parallel-to-floor and hold it there for a second - and I'm sure you'll find you're struggling to squat a weight you can easily and safely shoulder. The great thing about working out at home is you don't have to worry about looking like a wuss for having to do less weight/reps because you're doing an exercise properly. ;) It doesn't sound like you really want to be a power squatter, so I don't see why you'd ever have to shoulder more weight than is safe, to build and maintain a good level of lower body fitness and look with this exercise. Try this twice a week, and if after a few months you want to 'take it to the next level' then you can look for more solutions then.

[Braden]

RD - "This is NOT what goes on in a holdng posture, in fact holding postures are actually best done with as much relaxation as possible."

Hey, I agree completely. Although alot of people would tell you otherwise. Once again, I think stance training is excellent, and I'm currently trying to do it for 24 minutes 6 days a week. It's just not the ideal solution for working the muscles of your legs, which is what he asked for. Yes, it builds wonderful relaxation and whole body connection which can be used martially; but again, that's not what he asked for.

"For you to say that Stances don't build the jionts and bones shows your total lack of experiance on the subject."

Guy, there's no reason to get personal about it. The scientific evidence says otherwise. My experience says otherwise. That's all I said. If you disagree with both, that's perfectly fine.

[Shaolindynasty]

I don't want huge calves and mine are naturally large so that's why I don't use weight. If you want larger size do use weight. Although I would try not to over do it the first couple of lifting days if you want to be able to walk. Also I agree that type of iseolation isn't nessacary but it helps to reduce boredom.

Stance training is not actually iseometric. Iseometric is when you use maximum exerstion against an immoveable object.

Stance training is more like yoga. I do stance training, I don't recomend it for strength training or trying to gain in size though. Stance training is more like a standing meditation for me.

[Royal Dragon]

Sorry, did'nt meant to get your goat, nexttime point out you have different experiances from the info you are putting out.

RD

[fa_jing]

I don't beleive that stance training is going to give you high blood pressure, or really any ill effect at all. Otherwise, the chinese would have thrown this out a long time ago. CMA masters who did not die in battle probably had a compareable life expectancy to other Gong Fu such as opera acrobatics or other physical cultivation. I think it's great for joints because as RD said you don't have the grinding effect that you do with say, hindu squats, or normal weightlifting squats. The problem with "research" is that the test conditions often reflect the bias of the researchers. They might have had one group of people stand in a horse stance, with nothing else, and another group doing moving squats, and nothing else--but horse wasn't meant to be practiced with nothing else, so the research is meaningless. In every system that I've seen, horse stance training is followed by some kind of moving training, be it forms, running, jumping, whatever. This is to prevent the stagnation of energy in the legs, right? So Braden's quotation of research of a task "in isolation" really doesn't carry the information I'm interested in, while I would be interested in an action "in conjunction with the rest of your routine." So I think practising your horse for 5 minutes and then jogging 3 miles would give me more benefit then practising horse for 8 minutes or running 5 miles alone. (Just an example.)
-FJ

[Black Jack]

"CMA Masters who did not die in battle"

What does this mean? What battles?

[Braden]

I'm not sure what you mean by 'different experiences from the info you are putting out' as my experience confirmed the science. But I did explicitly state in my post that it was only my experience, rather than implying it was an absolute truth.

[fa_jing]

I meant, if you look at CMA masters throughout the years, they probably have a long life-expectancy compared to the average Chinese, except that if you count all the premature deaths from challenge matches, battle, training accidents, etc - these masters were living a military lifestyle - you might end up with a life expectancy that's not all that impressive. So it's a risky business, but if you avoid getting killed, your looking pretty good to make it to 100.

-FJ

[Rolling Elbow]

Is there anything to suggest that high sets are better for calves and the legs? I found that my calves hurt more and burned more without weight..with weight, they tired out but did not fel "worked"..Can sizeable gains be made doing high reps with no weight for the calves? I have been doing some reading on the subject and apparently higher repetitions yield great gains in the legs..as long as you are pushing the muscle to the max...does this apply here?

Currently i have found an interesting variation of my own but think i will use it as a finisher to some of the exercises mentioned. I squat and hold a bo over my head to keep my back straight. I then raise onto my toes using the claves while remaining in this squatted position. I don't have strong calves so I find it hits my ankles, calves and shins slightly...can anyone who has strong legs give it a try and let me know the bennefits or if i am wasting time?

Thanks to everyone for the info thus far.

[fa_jing]

High reps for legs cause they're mostly slow-twitch muscle fibers.
Especially the calves, I never could properly work them out with weights, then I found out I would get far more burn jumping rope.
Which I recommend.

-FJ

[Rolling Elbow]

I skip daily, probably 600 -1000 as a warm up to any work out i do.

[fa_jing]

Cool. I think your volume is pretty good, though I stopped counting a while ago so I don't know how long it takes to complete that many. Anyway, one way to skip is if you have a timer, skip for 3 minute rounds with 1 minute of rest. It a good way to build up and condition yourself for round-type sparring. I skip for as much as 15 minutes straight, but haven't been able to lately since I moved. My sifu says he used to skip rope for 15-30 minutes a day. Do you vary your jumps, like, alternate feet, feet together, kicking backwards, etc.?

-FJ

[Rolling Elbow]

I vary my feet: two together, off one to the other, bringing the knee up, just one foot at a time out, one back -one forward (mini lunge) etc..essentially i do the Rocky thang!

Ilike the 3 minute idea..I'll give it a shot.