Improve your pins with these pro tips!

While most men spend much of their training time focusing on the muscles above the waist (chest, arms, back), let’s face it, women tend to be more concerned with the parts below the waist. Whether you want to run faster, get stronger, or look absolutely great in a short skirt, your leg work probably takes up a large chunk of your time at the gym.

If that’s the case, you’re in luck, because in recent years, we’ve spent a lot of time talking to the owners of possibly the best pairs of pins in the fitness business. These are her secrets to strong and sexy legs.

• Because your upper body and gravity already offer resistance during leg training, you can increase the intensity of squats, lunges, and similar movements in other ways in addition to lifting heavier weights. A great way to increase intensity is to decrease the tempo from, say, a normal count of two or three to a count of five on the way down. If you want to be radical, you can even stop a few times for a few seconds, descending in a staggered fashion.

• If you do unilateral exercises and find that one leg is stronger than the other, train the weak leg first and let it determine how much weight it uses and how many repetitions it completes. On the leg press, for example, if you can do 10 reps with your right leg and 15 with your left, do 10 for both until your right catches up to you.

• When you crouch down and lunge, focus on keeping your glutes contracted. People often envision them as leg-only exercises, because that’s where the movement happens, but the glutes handle much of the load. Squeeze your muscles throughout the exercise.

• People often debate whether to get back up from squats immediately or pause for a second or two at the bottom, but the best strategy for most types of squats is an intermediate technique called “springback”, not a big bounce, but enough. so that the change in direction uses some of the elastic energy transfer in your body.

• Try something different every time you train your legs. Everything you can think of. Never stagnate.

• Mix up your leg training as much as possible. This is almost as important as rest when it comes to allowing your muscles to recover from workout to workout. If you don’t want to dedicate full month-long cycles to, say, heavy leg training, just add a heavy day to the mix every now and then. The response of everything from your central nervous system to your growth hormones will be different that day, and you are less likely to stagnate as a result.

• The biggest mistake beginners make is training their legs too often. If they train according to a body part division, most women don’t really need to train their legs more than once every five days or so. If you are an athlete and your legs are used to greater stimuli, your frequency could be about 3 days.

• Do a lot of cardio. Running and stair climbing in particular are good not only for cardiorespiratory endurance, but also for sculpting your legs and glutes. Increase the focus on your glutes by taking two steps at a time to raise the angle of hip extension.

• In squats and lunges, always keep your knees in line with your feet. Once your knees roll forward, they are in a compromised position that can lead to injury. Also, do not fail in these exercises until you have mastered the proper technique.

• Don’t avoid leg exercises just because they feel uncomfortable or difficult at first. Is the leg extension easier to master than the lunge? Absolutely. Does that mean you shouldn’t bother doing lunges? Absolutely not. Because lunges require you to use more than one set of joints, recruit a lot more auxiliary muscles and require more balance, they will be more difficult to do at first, it is the nature of the beast. This is why you should be doing them, not avoiding them.