3 Effective Leg Exercises That You Can Do At Home

If you are looking to build bigger stronger legs, your local gym will usually have everything you need to help you achieve this goal.

For example, you will be able to use the leg press machine, which many people consider to be the number one machine for building massive quads, as well as the leg curl and leg extension machines.

Plus of course you will have access to a squat rack and Smith machine to help you do squats with heavy weights, and you will also be able to do deadlifts using a barbell and weights (with as much weight as you can handle).

However if you are not a member of a gym, but would still like to develop your legs, there are certain exercises that you can do at home that will get decent results:

Squats

Squats are commonly performed in the gym with a heavy barbell, but the squat is one of those exercises that you can do anywhere.

If you are just starting out, you can strengthen many different muscles in your legs and work your glutes to help develop a shapely butt just by doing bodyweight squats, as you can see for yourself by checking out these before and after squats photos from women who have performed this exercise repeatedly for 30 days.

Once you have mastered these, you can then move on to pistol squats where you squat on one leg whilst extending your other leg out in front of you without touching the floor.

However you can get more out of this exercise by using a set of dumbbells, for example, to provide more resistance, and if you don’t have any weights at home, you could simply fill a backpack with books or other heavy objects and do some squats whilst wearing it on your back.

Lunges

The lunge is another popular exercise that will work many different muscle groups in your legs, including your quads, glutes and hamstrings, and is also another exercise that can be done pretty much anywhere with or without weights.

Therefore it is a perfect leg exercise to do at home, and the good thing about the lunge is that there are many different variations that you can do in order to target different areas of your lower body.

For instance, you can do forward and backward lunges where you simply lunge forwards and backwards on one leg and push yourself back up to the starting position, or if you have a little more space, you can do walking lunges, alternating from one leg to another.

Once these become too easy, you can then start doing all of these lunges whilst holding a set of dumbbells in order to really tone and strengthen your legs.

Calf Raises

The calves are very often neglected because they are quite hard to target, but one of the best ways to develop your calf muscles is to start doing the calf raise exercise.

You can perform this exercise very easily at home because you simply need to stand upright and push yourself up on to your toes, lifting your heels as you do so.

Many people perform this exercise on a flat surface, but for a greater range of motion and increased intensity, you should stand with the front of your feet on a raised platform.

You can also make this exercise harder and more effective by holding a set of dumbbells at the same time, or simply by holding on to a heavy object of some kind.

Finally, if you really want to work these calf muscles, you can move on to one-legged weighted calf raises on a raised platform and do as many reps as you can manage.

 

The three moves discussed above are all very easy to do at home, and if you buy a set of dumbbells to add a little more resistance, it is very easy to strengthen your legs and glutes and add a little bit of muscle definition if you perform these exercises regularly.