If you want to skip leg day that’s up to you, but if you weren’t to skip leg day, you would reap a myriad of benefits far exceeding tree trunk thighs.
Why you should not skip leg day if you want to be big, period.
Foreword:
As part of our series on testosterone in advance of our new book Reclaim Your Masculinity, we have been discussing the role of testosterone in the male body, especially with regard to muscle gain and healthy sexual function — with why you should not skip leg day coming into play.
We have already considered foods that lower your testosterone, foods that raise it, the ways in which having low testosterone can ruin your life, the role of xenoestrogens in disrupting male hormones, and the testosterone-boosting effects of the South African herb bulbine natalensis, as well as ecdysterone, a spinach derivative that has extremely strong anabolic properties but does not seem to increase testosterone levels.
In this article we’ll discuss the importance of compound movements, and especially leg exercises such as squats, in generating the testosterone increases that are essential for developing muscle. This is something that has been recognised for a long time, including by the Iron Guru Vince Gironda, but has recently been corroborated by detailed scientific studies, leaving the average lifter fewer reasons to skip leg day.
Board Shorts
The class of competition known as ‘men’s physique’ has officially made it okay to be top-heavy and potentially skip leg day
Skip Leg Day? At Your Own Peril
It has of course become something of a fitness cliché: the gymbro with an enormously well-developed upper body and matchstick legs. Bicep curls get the girls, as they say. But what about squats? Heavy squats give you the trots? It’s certainly a more likely outcome than gaining the attention of the opposite sex with your amazingly well developed thigh biceps. Which is of course why so many people avoid training their legs like the plague. Leg exercises are just plain hard, and they don’t have the same poolside payoff. But it’s still no reason to skip leg day.
The bodybuilders with the greatest leg development, men like Tom Platz, went to the edge and back, every session, to ensure that their legs would grow. Whether he was squatting 500lbs for 23 or more reps, as in his famous contest with ‘Dr Squat’ Fred Hatfield, or squatting 200lbs for a no-less-insane 100 rep set, Tom Platz knew that only a kill-or-be-killed attitude to leg training would produce the results he wanted. Seriously. Watch the video below if you don’t believe me.
Tom Platz — the man who would never skip leg day — demonstrating the insane intensity required to get freaky leg development
In recent years, the top-heavy matchstick-leg physique has been given legitimacy through the creation of the men’s physique class of competition, which even takes place at competitions as prestigious as the Arnold Classic and the Mr Olympia — something that has been subject of a lot of memes deriding those who skip leg day. In men’s physique, instead of wearing the bodybuilder’s famous posing pouch, the competitors wear long board shorts, reaching to the knee. No need to be embarrassed about those chicken legs: all eyes are on the competitors’ upper bodies.
Arnold trolling a men’s physique winner
But what if these competitors were actually missing out on a trick? What if, as Golden Age bodybuilders like Vince Gironda knew, training your legs was an essential part of not just leg but whole-body development?
Skip Leg Day for Smaller Arms
Vince Gironda: Train Legs To Grow Your Arms
Vince Gironda (1917-1997) is one of the great mavericks of bodybuilding history.
For various reasons, his contribution to bodybuilding, including his anticipation of many later trends, still remains to be properly recognised.
We offer a comprehensive 12-month 5×5 programme based on Golden Era principles for strength and aesthetics. Get it here.
In addition to his difficult, outspoken personality – he famously called Arnold Schwarzenegger a ‘fat f***’ the first time he met him – the general trajectory of bodybuilding over his lifetime was divergent from his own ideas and practices.
Among many pet dislikes, Vince shunned shiny, complicated machines, he wouldn’t allow music in his gyms and he hated, with a passion, the use and abuse of steroids.
The ‘mass monster’ ideal that became dominant in the early 1990s, with the ascendancy of Dorian Yates, was the absolute antithesis of Vince’s aesthetic ideal, which involved the careful placement of mass to suit the individual’s frame.
For Vince, bodybuilding was an art, governed by eternal principles that had first been recognised by the Ancient Greeks.
We’ve already discussed various aspects of Vince Gironda’s thoughts on training and diet in a number of articles: how Larry Scott trained his chest under Vince’s tutelage; Vince’s ‘steak and eggs’ diet for contest preparation; and his 36-eggs-a-day diet for mass gain.
It’s in one of Vince’s many pamphlets, ‘Balanced Arms’, that he lays out the link between training legs and having bigger arms. He writes:
‘Another point I must make is that to acquire bigger arms you must include some leg work. You will gain 15% more arm size by including leg work on the off day. The reason for this is that muscle is developed only in ratio with the amount of nerve force developed. And leg work generates the greatest amount of nerve force of any single bodypart.’
It’s worth noting that Vince wasn’t the first person to make the link between leg training and overall mass gain. One of the touted benefits of the old-school ‘squats and milk’ routine – in which you consume large quantities of whole milk and perform high-rep squats – was whole body mass gain, and this claim has been repeated in favour of other squat-heavy programmes like Randall Strossen’s Super Squats, which claimed that you could gain 30lbs of muscle in six weeks just by adding high-rep squats to your routine — so you have even fewer excuses to skip leg day.
So is there any truth behind the claim? We’ve already seen that, in the case of the 36-eggs-a-day diet, many of Vince’s claims about the anabolic powers of whole eggs are being proven by scientific studies, and in the case of leg training improving your arm growth, Vince wasn’t wrong either.
The Science Behind Why You Should Not Skip Leg Day
The Norwegian researcher Bent Rønnestad and his colleagues have vindicated Vince’s claims about the effects of leg training on whole-body muscular development. Yes, compound leg training does cause the greatest amount of nerve stimulation, as Vince claimed, and it also boosts the metabolism and causes natural increases in growth hormone and testosterone. [R]
In their experiments, Rønnestad et al compared the effects of training arms alone with training them directly after performing leg exercises. They carefully screened the participants to ensure that they had ‘the same nutritional and genetic environment’.
‘Serum testosterone and growth hormone was significantly increased during the L+A [leg and arm] training session, while no hormonal changes occurred in the A [arm] session. Both A and L+A increased 1rm in biceps curl, peak power in elbow flexors at 30% and 60% of 1rm, and muscle volume of the elbow flexors (p<0.05). However, only L+A achieved increase in the CSA [cross-sectional area], while no changes occurred in A. L+A had superior relative improvement in 1rm biceps curl and favorable muscle adaptations in elbow flexors compared to A (p<0.05). In conclusion, performing leg exercises prior to arm exercises, and thereby increasing the levels of serum testosterone and growth hormone, induced superior strength training adaptations compared to arm training without acute elevation of hormones.’
The science is settled: don’t skip leg day!
Golden Era Squats — The OGs never skip leg day
Serum testosterone and growth hormone was significantly increased during the L+A training session, while no hormonal changes occurred in the A session. Both A and L+A increased 1RM in biceps curl, peak power in elbow flexors at 30% and 60% of 1RM, and muscle volume of the elbow flexors (p<0.05). However, only L+A achieved increase in CSA at the part of the arm flexors with largest cross sectional area (p<0.001), while no changes occurred in A. L+A had superior relative improvement in 1RM biceps curl and favorable muscle adaptations in elbow flexors compared to A (p<0.05).
Serum testosterone and growth hormone was significantly increased during the L+A training session, while no hormonal changes occurred in the A session. Both A and L+A increased 1RM in biceps curl, peak power in elbow flexors at 30% and 60% of 1RM, and muscle volume of the elbow flexors (p<0.05). However, only L+A achieved increase in CSA at the part of the arm flexors with largest cross sectional area (p<0.001), while no changes occurred in A. L+A had superior relative improvement in 1RM biceps curl and favorable muscle adaptations in elbow flexors compared to A (p<0.05).
Of course, in a sense this shouldn’t be a surprise, because we all know that compound lifts are the best for stimulating muscular growth. This is why so many beginner programmes, including our Golden Era 5×5, focus on using compound lifts to achieve the best possible results, instead of isolation exercises. More muscle fibres activated = more growth. What Rønnestad’s findings show is that this principle really does have a carry-over across muscle groups.
How to incorporate these findings into your training
Okay, so if performing leg exercises before arm exercises yields better results, how can I incorporate this into my own workouts? Quite simply, you can try performing leg exercises before you work your arms, shoulders and even your chest if you want. We would suggest that you don’t need to perform extra leg exercises before you train your back, especially if you’re doing deadlifts, because you will already be stimulating large slabs of muscle. It might be the case that you are already training legs and back together anyway.
You can painlessly sprinkle your total lower body volume throughout the week instead of a grueling high volume session that would make some diehards want to skip leg day.
Although the bench press, the foundation of most chest days, is a classic compound lift, less muscle is involved than in the deadlift or other back compound movements, so we would hypothesise – and I have deliberately used that word – that even chest training might benefit from the added stimulation of some leg exercises beforehand.
So, here’s what we recommend. First, if you aren’t already performing leg exercises, you should be: you should have a dedicated leg session at least once a week. Second, on days when you are training arms, shoulders or chest, we recommend performing compound leg exercises – basically squat variations (back or front squats) – before you get on to the arms, shoulder or chest exercises you are set to perform.
There is no reason to kill yourself. Three or four sets of 10 reps with a weight you can handle for 15 would probably be more than enough. Rønnestad’s study certainly gives no indication that his test subjects were killing themselves with high-rep breathing squats before they performed their arm exercises, and neither should you. ‘Train to stimulate, not annihilate’, as Lee Haney put it.
More Muscle = Higher BMR
The final reason why you should not skip leg day is because your basal metabolic rate (BMR) will be higher than what it would be with undeveloped legs.
The quadriceps, for example, are the biggest muscles in the body; and you could potentially gain several pounds of muscle in your legs.
Muscle is very metabolically expensive, clocking in at around an extra 20-30 calories per pound at rest.
Moreover, when performing cardio or even walking, you will burn more total calories as 1) you have more muscle mass to carry around and 2) more calories are burned in each muscular contraction in well-developed muscles.
This means that you can eat more calories without gaining fat or even lose fat at a higher daily caloric intake.
Now ditch those board shorts and get squatting!
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