Most effective leg exercises

The belief that eating carbs at night directly results in fat gain is one of those fitness myths that needs to go away. Eating carbs at night does not automatically cause them to be stored as fat. If you’re in a caloric deficit, you will lose fat regardless of when you eat your carbs. If you work out at night, you probably should be eating a decent amount of your carbs at night. If you work out during the day, then you probably want to have more carbs closer to your workout. However, that’s strictly for performance benefits and if you choose to eat them at night instead, it won’t have a negative impact on body composition.


Legs...everyone’s favorite right? Our legs are essentially half of our body yet most people seem to do more weekly sets for their biceps instead.
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The most effective leg exercises are compound exercises which means they don’t hit just one area of your leg. For example, squats are the king of quad exercises. However, squats also hit your glutes and hamstrings to some extent. Swipe left for a good graphic by showing different squat variations. Lunges can be tweaked to emphasize more quads or more glutes/hamstrings but however you do them, they will hit everything. Leg presses are solid as well.
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The exercises that are more hamstring specific are Romanian deadlifts (or stiff leg deadlifts which are similar), glute ham raises, and leg curls (seated or lying).
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Calves are pretty straight forward. I like to do standing calf raises one day during the week and seated on another. If you don’t have calf raise machines at your gym, you can do them on a leg press.
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Although glutes are not specifically mentioned here, your glutes will be hit with just about all of these (squats, lunges, leg presses, deadlifts, glute ham raises in particular). The only other glute specific exercise I would recommend are hip thrusts.
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