LEGS
Muscle Groups: Quadriceps, Hamstrings, Calves & Gluteus Maximus.
Why train the Legs?
They constitute the largest muscle groups in the body.
If you want to have a holistic approach to strengthening your musculoskeletal system, then you can not ignore the legs and they become more important to train than any other part of the body, owing to their sheer size. A person with strong legs and a weak upper body is always stronger than a person with weak legs and a strong upper body.
Apart from strengthening the musculoskeletal structure, weight training also happens to be a great fat loss tool.
Weight Training achieves Fat loss through 2 distinct ways.
The first way is the body’s direct response to the breakdown in muscle tissue that intense weight training achieves. The direct response is that of carrying out Repair work or rebuilding the damaged tissue. The body will try and adapt to the stress put on it by weight training by not just repairing itself to its former self but super compensating and making the muscle cells bigger (Hypertrophy) than they originally were. This is done so that the same level of stress provided by a particular level of intensity can not cause the same damage again.
Thus intense weight training causes damage to the muscle cells and at the same time triggers off the repair work of the damaged muscle. This repair work requires a lot of calories. Thus the body burns calories at an accelerated rate even after the cessation of the workout. This is termed as the After-Burn. This goes to show that intense Weight training increases the Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR), which is the rate at which the body burns calories at rest.
It is logical that the amount of After Burn will be dependant on the amount of surface area of the body that needs repairing. Hence the larger the damaged muscle the greater the After-Burn. To put it more simply, a damaged quadriceps will cause a greater afterburn than a damaged Triceps.
Hence it would be fair to conclude that the greatest After-Burn is achieved while training of Legs, since the largest muscle groups in the body happen to be part of legs (The Gluteus Maximus happens to be the largest muscle in the body).
So if fat burning is your goal then you can not afford to not train Legs.
The second pathway through which Weight training promotes Fat loss is after Hypertrophy is achieved. Given the fact that during the repair process sufficient rest and protein is given to the body, lean tissue growth will occur. Muscle being an active tissue requires a lot of calories to maintain it self. Hence a 5% increase in Lean tissue can cause a 25% increase in BMR. The larger the muscle in which Hypertrophy is achieved the greater the increase in BMR. In other words if the Quadriceps get bigger the consequent increase in BMR will be much higher than if the hypertrophy were to occur in the Deltoids.
All said and done whichever way you look at it, ignoring Legs in your training regime is a grave mistake.
train, eat ,sleep and grow'.
A b b a s'.