The BEST Dumbbell Exercises LEGS EDITION!

introduction:

(1) JEFF: Today we continue our best dumbbell exercise series. This time, bringing you the legs edition. Let's get this out of the way right off the bat. Your best exercise options, when it comes to your legs, are likely going to involve a barbell. Squat and deadlifts, to name a few. However, that's not the rule of the series. As we've continued from the very beginning, there are some rules in place. I've got select dumbbell exercises, but I request a favor in return. I need to at least be able to categorize them.

(2) Based on training goals, I need to be able to slot in those exercise choices for strength, hypertrophy, power, a metabolic exercise, a total body option, a corrective exercise option, and one of those miscellaneous that doesn't really fit into any of those other categories. So, what I'm going to do is break those down, exercise by exercise and I'm going to- JESSE: Whoa. Whoa. JEFF: Can I get through a post without you? JESSE: Whoa. I think I should be taking care of this post because, as we know, I've made some serious.

(3) leg gains. JEFF: Okay. Freddy Mercury? JESSE: Thank you for the compliment on the mustache, by the way. JEFF: It wasn't a complement. I think I can handle this, as I always handle my post . But I wouldn't call myself – why do you think you can do this? JESSE: Because I think you should be calling me the 'King of Quads'. JEFF: The King of Quads? JESSE: The King of Quads.

(4) I think that's a better nickname than Freddy Mercury. JEFF: I don’t think it's really King of Quads. JESSE: You know, it looks more like the Queen of Quads to me. JEFF: See? I agree. That's a better name for you, actually. JESSE: I can't win, can I? JEFF: NO, you can't. All right, guys. We're going to kick it off with our strength exercise.

Strength:

(1) I'm going to give you two because I want to give you one anterior chain, knee dominant exercise and one posterior chain, hip dominant exercise because it matters. JESSE: Whoa. Pardon me, pardon me. When you say, 'posterior chain', are we talking about the glutes? Like a fat bottomed girl? Because, as we all know 'Fat bottom girls, you make the rockin' world go 'round'. JEFF: Are we going to have to do this the whole video? Guys, let's start with the anterior chain, knee dominant exercise. We're talking about the reverse lunge.

(2) One of my favorite exercises you can do. I love unilateral training, but I also like the fact that we can load this one a little bit heavier. You can use 100lb plus dumbbells if you want and if you can manage them. The fact is, it's how you perform the exercise that matters. Here, for anterior chain, because we can sit back and upright, we can really load up on the quads in a big way. Now, you can see when Jesse does this he's stepping, not just straight back because that would narrow his base of support and make the exercise vulnerable to someone that has a weak balance.

(3) But we don’t need to do that. As he steps back you can also step a little bit out to widen that base of support, widen his stance, and give himself the best opportunity to continue to load the exercise for the purpose of building his strength. Now, if we switch over to the other side here, we're going to go posterior chain. My exercise for this is going to be the Romanian deadlift. Again, what we do here is perform this in the same way we would with a barbell. We let the dumbbells slide down and the main focus here is allowing the hips to hinge backward. I’m not even caring where the dumbbells go. Their travel should be straight up and down.

(4) The main thing you should be focused on is the movement in the sagittal plane of the hips. Get them to creep back as far as your hamstring length will allow you. When you get there, you initiate the return by squeezing and driving with the glutes back up to the top. If you're limited in the depth that you can go because of the flexibility of your hamstrings, it shouldn't compromise the fact that you can still load them with as heavy dumbbells as you can possibly hold here, still getting great benefits from the exercise.

Hypertrophy:

• Moving on, we go to the hypertrophy exercise selections. Once again, I'm going to give you two. One more for the anterior chain, one more for the posterior chain. My anterior chain selection is always the Bulgarian split squat. JESSE: I'm sorry, did you say, 'Bohemian split squat'? That's a part of my favorite song "Bohemian Rhapsody". JEFF: I said we're not doing this the whole post . JESSE: Do you want me to leave? JEFF: I want you to leave.

• Desperately. JESSE: I'm just a poor boy, I need no sympathy. JEFF: The Bulgarian split squat is a great exercise for the anterior chain. Why? We're able to do it two ways. We can do it in a more anterior-dominant, or posterior-dominant way, depending upon how we align our torso. Let's check out the anterior chain first. If you're going to load your quads and train your quads here, your main focus should be

• keeping an upright torso, as much as possible. Chest out, shoulders back, drop straight down, and load the quad. Now, what we can do, if we want to get more out of this and make this even more of a hypertrophy overload, we can add in some intensity techniques like the one-and-a-half technique, which is one of my favorites. You go down to the bottom, you go only halfway, you have to go back to the bottom again, and then you return up. We can also change this exercise, like I said, to become more posterior chain dominant. All that requires is a change in torso position.

• You can see Jesse leans his torso a little more forward to lower that posterior chain. Nothing changes from this point on. As he goes down, the back-angle stays angled forward. He drives up, and back. You'll immediately be able to feel the difference in the load shifting toward the glutes to perform the exercise. Again, the same techniques could still be used here by prolonging the amount of tension we focus on those muscles to create more of a hypertrophy benefit.

Power:

(1) Moving on now, we're at the category of power. To choose an exercise properly here, you have to have one that allows you to accelerate the weights that you're moving. Power is going to rely on your ability to move the weights you're moving quickly. My favorite exercise here is the dumbbell jump squat. This exercise is designed to not only become more explosive but carries over well to some

(2) of the more explosive exercises, like the hang-clean and power-clean. The key here is to choose a weight that's not too heavy, which will slow down your ability to perform this properly. I like to aim for a weight that's combined to be about 25% to 50% of your bodyweight. So, if you're a 200lb person, you're looking at a combined weight of 50lbs. So 25lbs in each hand.

(3) Remember, you want to make sure you're achieving triple extension. Meaning, you want to extend through the ankles, the knees, and then the hips in that sequence to allow the kinetic chain to pass that power from the ground up, into this explosive jump. But it doesn’t just end there. You also have to make sure you can eccentrically control the landing, reset, recoil, and prepare yourself for another high-quality repetition.

• It's not about training to failure when you're training for power. It's not about training to a certain level of fatigue. What you're trying to do is accumulate only high quality, powerful repetitions in a defined period of time to maximize that speed output and maximize your overall power generation.

Overload:

(1) Moving on now, we have an option for a metabolic overload. JESSE: Whoa! Whoa! JEFF: Knowing that we can- JESSE: I know this one! I know this one! We're talking about bicycles, aren't we? Riding a bicycle. Because I want to ride my bicycle. JEFF: I said no more Freddy Mercury. JESSE: No more? JEFF: No more Freddy Mercury. Please.

(2) JESSE: Do you really want me out? JEFF: I want you out. Bye. Bye. Bye. JESSE: Bicycle! Bicycle! I want to- JEFF: Okay. Thank you for hanging with me. We're talking about something called 'walk the box'. This is a brutal, ball-buster. I’m going to call it what it is.

(3) I use this, as you can see here, when the Usos and Seamus from the WWE came into the Xbox here to train. What we're doing here is trying to build our mental fortitude. We're trying to get to that metabolic burn and then figure out a way we can savor that and prolong that. It's not easy, but it delivers different overload benefits. So, what we do is get down in position with two dumbbells in the front rack position, and we walk the box. You're really just tracing a square around a small area of the floor in front of you. We really focus on proper placement of the hips. You don’t want your knees caving into internal rotation of the hips. What you want to do is stay down at the bottom of the squat, still maintain proper form, maintain good thoracic extension through your upper back, and be able to walk around.

(4) It's good because we're getting three-dimensional movement as well. But you'll see you're going to light your legs up in ways you never have before. It's whether or not you can withstand that, and for how long, to see how much benefit you get from doing this. How much of the metabolic burn can you tolerate? I promise, give it a try. Maybe don’t try dumbbells if you can't in the beginning, just to get the form down. But add those dumbbells in. I promise you a real ball-buster. Next up, our total body option.

Squat Clean:

• What we can do here is utilize the dumbbells in a very similar way to what we would do with the barbell. We can use a clean variation here. One of my favorite exercises, when we're talking about total body force generation is a squat clean. What we do is have a pair of dumbbells. And these can be pretty heavy.

• There's no reason why you can't load up 100lbs here if you're that strong. I guarantee you're going to find that's pretty damn challenging. So, start lighter. The idea is that you clean them from the floor and try to get them into that front rack position. One of the best things you can do to ensure you do this properly is try to time your stomp with the catch of the dumbbells onto your shoulders. The good thing is, if you catch the bottom portion of the dumbbell on top of your shoulder,

• it's going to get your elbows into that proper front rack position. The key here, this is a great exercise. It builds the strength of the entire kinetic chain, once again, and it gives us another option to utilize some dumbbells that could still challenge us, regardless of the fact that we don’t have access to a barbell.

Adductor Complex:

(1) The next exercise is tailor made for the use of dumbbells. That is when we select our corrective exercise. When it comes to the lower body, one of the most overlooked muscle complexes is going to be the adductor complex. Five muscles on the inside of your legs here that are not only going to provide stability to your pelvis but assist you in getting out of the hole at the bottom of a squat. Like some of our traditional barbell exercises.

(2) They work perfectly with the lighter weight of a dumbbell. What we do is get one of our feet that we can slide on a surface. I don’t care if you have a hardwood floor, if you have a tile floor like this. You get into some socks, you put your one foot on a stable surface and allow the sliding foot to drop down as you shift all your weight to the other leg. When you get down there, how do you get out? The entire movement up is going to be generated by allowing the stretch that was created on

(3) the adductors on that side to allow you to come back to the top. By squeezing and shortening back up to the top. You don’t realize that these muscles are pretty damn weak. The purpose of the corrective exercise is to allow us to attack that weakness with a very specific attack plan. I promise, you're going to find this to be an incredibly effective exercise at targeting weakness you maybe never knew you even had.

Miscellaneous:

• We finish up here with our specialization category, or our miscellaneous/potluck category, where we can apply other exercises that don’t fit neatly into these other categories but are still very important. What I'm going to show you here is going to allow you to target those hips once again, but instead of the inside out we're going to go from the outside in. We're going to target the glute medias. A muscle just as overlooked and underworked as the adductor complex.

• The best way to do this is with this offset dumbbell lunge. What we do is load the dumbbell on one hand and step out and lunge with the opposite leg. Of course, you're going to work both sides of this. The fact is, what we're creating is this demand on the glute medias to maintain a level torso and a level pelvis throughout the exercise. As the weight is places in this opposite hand and I step out with the other leg, we have a tendency to have the weight pull on us in that direction.

• Especially if we're using something incredibly heavy. To counteract that, we have to use the glute medias on this side to pull us back, to get ourselves back up to level, or prevent us from falling in that direction in the first place. That's a tremendous exercise option to do that. Again, you're going to feel that burn in your hip you probably haven't felt before, but that's a good thing because it's exposing a weakness you've already allowed to take.

conclusion:

(1) place. There you have it, guys. The best of – wait. What are you doing here? I told you to leave. JESSE: Oh, you know. You can't stop me now. Don't stop me now! JEFF: Guys, back to the list here. Hopefully you find these dumbbell exercises helpful. Again, it's important to break down the exercises that we select here because there are different types of training purposes in what you're trying to train for.

(2) Hopefully, these will fulfill those different categories for you. If you're looking for a step by step program where we build out all our plans based on the science and selection of what we do – not just in the exercises we choose, but how we lay them all out from day to day – you can find them over at ATHLEANX. com. In the meantime, if you haven't already done so, please- JESSE: Hey! Did you see Freddy Mercury here? JEFF: I did. JESSE: Did you get his autograph? JEFF: No, did you? JESSE: I didn't see him.

(3) I saw him go out the door. JEFF: Oh. Yeah. No, I didn't get it. JESSE: Oh. JEFF: I didn't get it. Can you tell them to subscribe, at least? While you're here. JESSE: Hey, guys. Don’t forget to .It's really important. JEFF: Okay.

(4) All right. Where can they find our programs? JESSE: ATHLEANX. com. JEFF: And what should they do? JESSE: Leave a comment and thumbs up below and let us know what you want to see in the future. JEFF: He said it all, guys. All right, be back here again soon. See ya. Bye, Freddy. JESSE: Bye!

Leg Dumbbell Exercises:

Exercise	Primary Muscles Targeted	Secondary Muscles Targeted
Goblet Squat	Quadriceps, Glutes	Hamstrings, Core
Bulgarian Split Squat	Quadriceps, Glutes	Hamstrings, Calves, Core
Dumbbell Lunge	Quadriceps, Glutes	Hamstrings, Calves, Core
Dumbbell Step-Up	Quadriceps, Glutes	Hamstrings, Calves, Core
Romanian Deadlift	Hamstrings, Glutes	Lower Back, Core
Dumbbell Deadlift	Hamstrings, Glutes	Lower Back, Core
Dumbbell Box Jump	Quadriceps, Glutes	Calves, Hamstrings, Core
Calf Raise	Calves	Soleus (Lower Calves)
Dumbbell Leg Press	Quadriceps, Glutes	Hamstrings, Calves, Core
Dumbbell Thrusters	Quadriceps, Glutes	Shoulders, Core

Legs Dumbbell FAQS:

Question 1: What is a key benefit of incorporating dumbbell exercises into your leg workout routine?

Answer: Dumbbell exercises for legs offer the advantage of unilateral training, helping to address muscle imbalances and improve overall stability, which is crucial for functional strength.

Question 2: Which dumbbell exercise targets the quadriceps effectively?

Answer: The dumbbell front squat is an excellent choice for targeting the quadriceps. Holding a dumbbell in each hand at shoulder height while performing squats engages the quads intensely.

Question 3: How can dumbbell lunges contribute to a well-rounded leg workout?

Answer: Dumbbell lunges are versatile and effective for building leg strength and muscular endurance. They engage the quads, hamstrings, and glutes while also improving balance and stability.

Question 4: What's the significance of incorporating step-ups with dumbbells into a leg routine?

Answer: Step-ups with dumbbells are beneficial for targeting the muscles in the lower body, particularly the quadriceps and glutes. Additionally, they promote unilateral strength development and can enhance functional fitness.

Question 5: How do dumbbell Romanian deadlifts contribute to hamstring development?

Answer: Dumbbell Romanian deadlifts are a potent exercise for hamstring development. By hinging at the hips and maintaining a slight knee bend, this exercise effectively engages the hamstrings, promoting strength and flexibility in the posterior chain.