When most people complain about a lack of muscle growth, they talk about their arms or their chest. MAYBE their shoulders. Typical beach muscle stuff. But if someone complains that their legs won’t grow, you know they’re a real one. That they truly care about training hard and pushing themselves. Because growing tree trunk legs takes heavy lifting and honest work.
But like most things that take hard work, the results are worth it. If your legs won’t grow and you’re sick of being in the toothpick quads club, it could be because you’re making one of these six mistakes:
1. You Squat with Your Back
Mike Boyle, godfather of American strength and conditioning and notorious anti-squat crusader, famously said that back squats aren’t a leg exercise, they’re a lower back exercise. I disagree on principle, but if you watch the way most people squat, he’s not wrong.
Perhaps your legs won’t grow because you squat with poor technique:
- Lower back arched
- Wide stance
- Head up
This antiquated approach that’s still propagated by old school powerlifters shifts much of the stress to your lower back and the connective tissue of your hips, rather than the musculature of your quads, glutes and adductors. If you want to feel squats in your legs, learn to brace your abs and root your feet.
Here are two quick videos explaining why a braced core and rooted feet are essential for squat success:
2. You Don’t Get Your Knees Over Your Toes
Another squat myth: your knees should never go over your toes. While driving your knees over your toes does increase sheer stress on the knees, just like anything else in training, it’s not inherently dangerous, especially if you build up a tolerance for it.
Even if you’re a more hip-dominant squatter (i.e., you sit back into your squats and keep a vertical shin), there are plenty of other exercises that will allow your knees to travel forward, increasing quad involvement and leading to greater leg hypertrophy. My absolute favorite: walking lunges.
Walking lunges allow for more knee flexion than reverse lunges or even stationary split squats, plus the added eccentric stress of absorbing the landing of each rep anecdotally leads to greater soreness and perhaps more muscle growth.
3. You’re Not Squatting Deep Enough
No matter what the latest clickbaiting social media influencer coach says about 90-degree angles, increased range of motion tends to lead to more muscle growth. It’s been shown time and again through both peer-reviewed research AND the anecdotes of jacked humans that deep squats under heavy loads lead to thick legs and a dump truck backside.
I understand that powerlifters don’t have to squat all that deep. Just below parallel is the competition standard and going deeper isn’t necessarily better, especially if you can’t lift as much weight. However, it’s entirely possible to train your competition squats just below parallel and then hit other squat variations with increased range of motion for the purpose of building bigger legs.
For example, you could do your main heavy squat work, followed by higher-rep, lower reps-in-reserve (RIR) sets of:
- Narrow-stance, high bar squats
- SSB squats
- Front squats
- And a personal favorite leg finisher, foam roller hack squats
Check the depth and shin angle on these! Good luck walking after a high-rep set of hack squats.
4. You’re Not Going Heavy Enough
When juxtaposing training for strength and hypertrophy, we often tend to think hypertrophy involves nothing but lighter weights, higher reps and sets taken close to failure. That’s certainly one viable approach, but when it really comes down to it, the most reliable way to build muscle is to create mechanical tension. And that comes from, as Ronnie Coleman famously said, “heavy ass weight.”
If your legs won’t grow but you’ve been shying away from heavy squats and deadlifts, it’s time to buckle up and slap some plates on the bar. Even “non-hypertrophy” rep ranges like set of 1-5 will still have a pronounced impact on hypertrophy as long as:
- Your overall volume increases over time
- You gradually add weight to the bar over time
- You do other exercises for 8-20 reps per set
And remember, as your 1-rep max increases, you’ll probably see an increase in the weights you can use for hypertrophy-range sets. That’s a double whammy to further drive size gains.
My favorite way to make sure I’m squatting heavy(ish), no matter what training phase I’m in: Hatfield squats. By using some hand support, you remove some of the torso stability demand, letting you load up your legs more than just about any other squat variation. If you don’t have a safety squat bar, run (don’t walk) and order one just so you can do Hatfields.
5. You Only Train Legs Once a Week
If you look at your typical body part split pulled out of a bodybuilding magazine (do people still ready physical magazines?), legs often only get trained once a week. Chest, back, arms, shoulders and… legs as an afterthought.
This is a huge mistake and perhaps the main reason well-meaning, hard-working lifters can’t get their legs to grow. Even those using a well-designed 3-day split (like those I talk about here) that goes push-pull-legs or lower-upper-full will have their back against the wall when it comes to leg growth.
In general, it’s a good idea to train muscle groups at least twice a week. It seems that larger muscle groups (legs, chest, lats) recover slower and can be trained effectively less often, while smaller muscle groups (arms, rhomboids, rear delts, calves, etc.) recover faster and can be trained more frequently. So twice a week seems to be the sweet spot for legs.
If your leg training revolves around heavy squats and deadlifts, as is the case for most powerlifters, it’s really as simple as this:
- 1st Leg Day of the Week: Squat heavy, deadlift light, smoke your quads, do some lighter hamstring work
- 2nd Leg Day of the Week: Squat light, deadlift heavy, smoke your hamstrings, do some lighter quad work
That’s it. I’ve been using that recipe for myself and the majority of my lifters for a long time now. Quads, hamstrings and glutes all get trained twice a week without getting totally obliterated both times.
6. You’re Not Training Knee Flexion
When I was first getting into coaching back in 2010, there was a trend among “functional” strength coaches to stay away from training the hamstrings via direct knee flexion. Basically, everyone hated leg curls of all kinds because the knees never flex in isolation during athletic movements like running, jumping, etc.
Consequently, we had a whole generation of athletes miss out on some serious hamstring gains because leg curls are an excellent way to add muscle mass directly to the belly of the hamstrings. Even if they’re not “functional” (whatever that means) and don’t have direct carryover to sporting movements, they still beef up your knee joint and provide some important body armor to stand up to heavy squatting.
And even if you’re deadlifting heavy and doing full range of motion RDLs, you’re probably not taking both the proximal (near your glutes) and distal (near your knees) portions of your hamstring through their full ROM. You absolutely should do those, but leg curls of some kind can fill in the gaps.
It doesn’t matter what kind of leg curls you do. Machines, seated or prone, slider leg curls, glute ham raises, etc. They’re all great. Just do something. Just like squats alone probably aren’t enough for optimal quad development, deadlifts alone won’t give you hammies that split the back of your jeans.
Plant Some Trees
If you’re disgruntled with your leg progress and you’re making any of these mistakes, adjust your training accordingly. Even better, start training with a program that will add pounds to your squat and deadlift max AND give you bigger legs. That’s what you’ll get with Powerbuilding, the newest 12-week program on our Teachable platform.
Powerbuilding combines the best heavy, low-rep powerlifting methods to increase your big lifts with high-rep, near-failure bodybuilding training to make you look like an absolute savage. It’s on sale now for just $29 til Novemer 30, so grab your copy before the price goes up!
