Tips and Tricks for Leaning Your Legs
Are there certain tricks and tactics for leaning your legs? I mean, how are all those other women getting fit and shapely legs? There must be something to it, something you may be missing. Let’s cover a few tactics of leg training so you can get in with the fit crowd and start looking the part too. If your current goal is leaning your legs, this information will be right up your alley.
The Bare Basics
Leaning your legs is primarily in your diet and added cardio. Diet is most important. It will lay the path for your leg training and cardio.
1.) Eat a healthy and balanced meal every three hours
2.) Take in optimal protein for your body
3.) Choose fresh and natural food over processed
4.) Don’t go hungry or skip meals
5.) Limit and/or omit junk food
6.) Limit and/or omit alcohol
7.) Weight train to build your leg muscles
8.) Do cardio to burn off the fat on your legs
Your Diet Matters
What you put in your body has an effect on all the functions of your body, as well as your muscle to fat ratio. You can’t expect to eat fast food, processed food, or restaurant food as part of your nutrition plan and expect to be fit and lean. How nice it would be, but it just doesn’t work like that. Leaning your legs will take nutritional effort on your part. You have to avoid the junk foods and eat more foods that your body can use for metabolic purposes.
Eat a healthy and balanced meal every 3-4 hours. Each meal should contain a complete protein. If eating that much protein is difficult, invest in a good protein drink such as egg or Whey protein powder.
It’s critically important that you eat throughout the day and don’t skip meals. Skipping meals leads to extreme hunger and then you just end up binging. Once you binge, another chemical process takes place and you just have to start over again.
It’s simple; just eat healthy meals every 3 hours. Mother Nature has provided you with all the nutrients you need. Just pre-cook and pre-pack if you are on the go.
How to Weight Train
You need to build some muscle on your legs to get the shape that you want. Don’t fear leg training, thinking it’s going to give you bigger or bulkier legs. Muscle is lean and dense tissue. Fat, on the other hand, is what’s creating the mass.
For leaning your legs, it’s a good idea to use a variety of leg exercises, sets, and reps. This will keep your muscles off guard and continually responsive.
If You Have Out-of-Shape Legs
If your legs are just lifeless and out of shape, and not really large, then you can use a variety of weight loads, varying from heavy leg training to light leg training. You can do 4-5 exercises for your legs such as squats, stiff-legged deadlifts, hack squats, leg curls, and leg extensions. Sets in the 4-5 range work well and varying reps in the 8-15 range is ideal. Take about 1 1/2 minutes rest between sets.
If You Have Thick Legs
If your legs are genetically thick and massive, you will be better off leaning your legs by using weight loads from light to moderate poundage. Avoid heavy leg training. Heavy leg training will build your leg muscles, which is good, but on the flipside it’s just going to make your legs appear bigger because the underlying muscle will be pushing the fat on the legs out too, and it’s probably not the look you want.
You would do well doing 6-7 exercises for your legs, including such lifts like squats, plie squats, lunges, hack squats, leg curls, leg extensions, and good mornings. Do 5-6 sets of each exercise in the 15-25 rep range. Your rest time between sets should be limited to a minute. The Poliquin Group notes, “High volume, short rest weight workouts (commonly known as high-intensity or HIT) will produce a lot of metabolic stress.” It would benefit your leg training to use a variety of training principle such as drop sets, tri-sets and any other that allows you to get more reps in.
The Cardio Side
Part of leaning your legs involves cardio. Start your cardio off light such as 4 days a week for 20 minutes and build on that slowly each week. Engaging in cardio in this manner will prevent plateaus and burnouts, and it constantly challenges the body. If you jump in with both feet and do cardio 6 days a week for 45 minutes, you’ll just burn out in a matter of weeks. That puts you back at square one.
Cardio comes in many forms such as walking, jogging, sprinting, cycling, inline skating, the elliptical, etc. Some women are prone to building leg muscles very easily. If you fall in this category and don’t want the leg mass, I don’t recommend using the stepper, stepmill, or the treadmill on a steep incline. The constant stepping action can actually build the leg muscles even more.
Also, for leaning your legs, vary your cardio method, intensity, speed, and time to prevent cardio adaptation. Keeping your legs off guard will keep the fat burning process in high-gear.
