The lower body is very different! Your lower back, lower abs and your legs carry your weight and support you throughout the day. Whether you are driving, walking or even standing, these parts are always being used. Once you work out your lower body, mainly the legs, walking becomes quite hard and that discourages bodybuilders from working out on their legs. Unfortunately, this lack of desire to work on your legs might hurt your lower back and lower abs too!
Don’t Ignore Lower Ab Workouts
The main problem with missing out on lower body workouts is that you end up with an unnatural body shape and weak-core. As you work on the upper body, you gain a certain amount of strength and muscle mass. Your lower body needs to have the capability to support that mass as well as the movements that you make for your upper body workout. Your lower abs and lower back bear a lot of the brunt, even during upper body workouts, and giving these parts adequate attention is an essential part of lower body workouts for men and women.
There are many lower abs’ exercises for men that require them to spend considerable time on their lower body. These can be performed with abdominal machines but if you are looking for bodybuilder abs, then you need to go down the hard-path. Abs workout for men and women are quite similar since they are always based on body-weight exercise techniques. Whether you do crunches, the seated leg-raise, hanging leg raises or reverse crunches, you are only using your body weight and, therefore, the risk of injury is very low.
Despite no additional weight, these exercises have a significant effect on your lower abs and lower back, ensuring that get complete and proportional development of your lower body to support your upper abdominal muscles as well as other upper body workouts.
Never Forget your Leg Days
Mention leg days and even seasoned gym-goers cringe at the thought of walking around for an entire day with that constant pain in the legs. There are, however, many finer points about bodybuilding legs that most people tend to forget. You can hit squats all day long or spend days on the leg press but what you need for your legs is stability and strength. That means, you need to focus on your joints as well as your muscles.
Your ankles and knees have to bear the entire weight of your body, but if your joints are weak, no matter how strong your thigh, hamstring and calf muscles are, you will still struggle with knee-pain after a leg-session. Pain around your ankles and knees suggest that the joints aren’t strong enough to deal with your upper body and lower body workout yet. Bodybuilding legs is about complex movements that are complex and work on several parts of the leg at the same time. So, when you do a lunge, you are hitting your quadriceps, your hamstring as well as your glutes!
Every single muscle, in that group, is incredibly vital to maintain good leg strength and stability. Another major problem with bodybuilding legs is that most bodybuilders tend to focus their lower body workouts on the muscles they can see. That usually means, lower abs, thighs and calves get the most attention while the lower back, hamstrings and glutes are ignored. There isn’t a more dangerous way to approach bodybuilding, especially when it comes to lower body workouts for men and women.
Every muscle has an opposing muscle that helps maintain muscular balance in your body. For your thighs, which are the biggest muscle in your body, the hamstring is the opposing muscle. In order to maintain good balance, the strength ratio of thighs-to-hamstring is recommended at 1-to-0.6 (a recommended ratio for soccer players). That means, your hamstring should be 0.6 times as strong as your thigh muscle.
If your hamstring is weaker than that value, every time you make an explosive movement with your thighs, the risk of hamstring injury rises because your hamstring just does not have the strength to cope with that thigh-movement. The same goes for your body’s upper and lower sections.
If you only work on your upper body and ignore lower body workouts, you will likely pick up a lower body injury due to weak muscles. If your legs do not have the muscle and joint strength to carry your upper body, you will start picking up injuries around your joints and even walking or standing will become painful.
There are plenty of abs exercises for men and women that are designed to work both your legs and your core. If you want to get yourself into perfect shape and minimize the risk of injury from workouts, you need to focus on lower body workouts just as much as you focus on the upper parts. A good lower body workout will even start affecting your upper body workouts as you will notice, almost instantly, the difference it makes in adding stability to your body, to your core and your overall stance & posture during training.
Professional bodybuilders will never ignore lower body workouts, it’s mostly those gym-goers who’s fitness goals are more to do with look and overall appearance. If that’s the case, know this that a massive upper body on stilts is never going to impress the opposite sex!
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