For many people, leg day traditionally means lifting some kind of weights. The biggest muscle groups in the body are found in the legs and glutes, and to strengthen those muscles people often turn to compound moves like squats and deadlifts done with heavy weights.
However, you can do effective leg workouts at home without any weights at all, using creative ways to challenge the lower body muscles. This leg workout from YouTube fitness trainer Caroline Girvan can be done without any equipment bar a yoga mat and a chair or bench to rest your foot on when doing Bulgarian split squats.
It’s a 40-minute workout and Girvan makes use of tri-sets — a type of training where you do three exercises back-to-back without rest to increase the time under tension for the muscles targeted. It’s these tri-sets that make this a challenging and effective leg workout you can do without any weights at all.
Watch Caroline Girvan’s leg workout
The workout is made up of seven tri-sets, during which you do each move in the set for 45 seconds without taking a break. After completing the tri-set you take a 30-second break. You do each tri-set twice before moving on to the next one.
Many of the tri-sets involve holding a position for one of the 45-second sets, with these isometric exercises providing a mental challenge to go along with the physical one. Your muscles will be burning by the end of the hold periods to the point you’re relieved to get moving again and start doing the full range of motion with the exercise.
The workout sticks to classic leg exercises like squats, deadlifts and lunges, with variations on the moves to change the targeted muscles slightly. All of the main muscles in the lower body are targeted, along with smaller stabilizer muscles that you’ll be using in the exercises done on one leg in particular.
Since you don’t need any equipment for the session, it’s a great one to do while traveling, as well as at home. If you do have weights to hand and want to increase the intensity even further, or progress the workout once you’ve done it a couple of times, you can hold dumbbells or kettlebells during most of the exercises.
What are the benefits of this workout?
Leg workouts are obviously great for building strength in your lower body, but they are also good for boosting your metabolism and raising your heart rate, because you’re using the largest muscles in your body. Training for 40 minutes with this session will certainly improve your fitness along with your strength.
A workout like this is also good for your core strength and stability — make sure to move with control throughout to engage the stabilizer muscles in your body and do each exercise with the correct form.
If you’d rather take on a shorter session first and do you have weights available, you could try this five-move dumbbell workout, or if you prefer to train without weights this five-move bodyweight workout targets muscles all over the body.
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