Did you know that sitting too long will reduce the connective tissue’s flexibility for your legs joints? Moreover, it will also prevent muscle growth on your legs. Research proves that it will take a long time to recover your leg muscles as they are the crucial part of your body that can support your whole body weight. Your legs play an essential role in providing you with mobility and stability. Therefore, it is crucial to keep your legs in shape at all times. This article will show you some leg machine exercises training and guides you can use to start your leg exercise routine right away. Also, you will find some benefits of the exercise and learn more about which leg machines suit you the best.
Benefits of Doing Leg Machine Exercises
- Increase Stability and Mobility – As stated before, your legs play a key role in your stability and mobility. They are also the part of your body that can hold your body straight and give you whole balance. Training your legs will also improve your stability, mobility, and overall balance, so that you can do more, work more, and travel more.
- Improve Legs Strength – As you age, your legs strength will also reduce. One way to keep your legs strong is to exercise using leg machines. Or you can also try walking, jogging, or running every day. Stronger legs will help you perform other workouts easier and get better results. Also, you will get better core stability.
- Reduce The Risk of Leg Injuries – Since your legs will support most of your body weight, the risk of getting injuries in the lower part of your body is higher. By exercising, you provide your lower body part with better performance and reduce the risk of getting leg injuries.
- Support Upper Body Muscle Growth – One can say that leg muscles are part of the largest muscle group of your body, connecting directly with your back, hips, and chest. Therefore, training your lower body (thighs, legs, and feet) in one way or another will prepare your upper body to grow. This is also why people tend to start their fitness exercise routine with leg machines and equipment first, such as treadmill, leg press, skipping rope, squats, etc.
Types of Leg Machine Exercises
There are many types of legs exercise machines and equipment. Luckily, most of them are beginner-friendly, so you don’t have to doubt your fitness ability. But, if you are still not sure how to get started, keep reading as you will find step by step on how to start your leg machine exercises right away. Before that, here are some of the types of legs exercise machines:
- Leg Press Machine – This is the most popular legs workout among fitness enthusiasts as it aims at many parts of your lower body. You can train your hips, quadriceps muscles, hamstrings, glutes, ankles, calves, and knees altogether at the same time. To use this machine, you just need to sit in a position close to laying down on your back, then push the weight upward with your legs. Usually, you can add more resistance and endurance to your workout by adding more weight bars that you will move.
- Leg Extension Machine – This machine mainly aims to improve the quadriceps muscle strength, especially the front and side of the thighs. To use this machine, you need to sit upright and use the side handles to balance yourself. Next, position your legs right under the padded bars and extend your feet to raise the padded bars.
- Leg Curl Machine – This exercise mainly aims to strengthen your hamstrings, hips, and glutes area. First, you need to lay down on your chest and your legs extended right under the padded bars to use this machine. Then, curl your legs as far as you can reach to raise the padded bars.
You can do each exercise for around 8-12 reps per set. There are still other leg workout machines you can find other than the three machines stated above. Also, you can train your legs by using simple fitness equipment, such as skipping rope, resistance band, and elliptical.
Things to Keep in Mind When Doing Your Leg Machine Exercises
- Pick Your Favorite Machine – As you can see above, there are many ways to execute your leg exercise routine. You should pick the machine you are most comfortable with and focus on improving your physical fitness with that machine first before jumping to the other one.
- Warm-up – Leg exercises will tend to put lots of pressure on your body, especially on the lower body parts. Therefore, it would be best if you begin your routine with a warm-up to check if your body is ready for the hard training or not. You can do some leg stretches or light jogging with a treadmill before using the leg machines.
- Assign Your Sets and Reps – The best way to measure your reps and sets per session is by looking at how your body reacts to the warm-up. If you feel great and fit, you can improve your exercise leg routine by adding up some weight for your sets or increasing the sets per session. But, if you are not feeling motivated enough, you can focus more on the higher reps and lower weights.
- Choose Your Weight – You can always start with empty bars just to get the hang of the machine. Once you are comfortable enough, slowly add more weight to your bars to increase resistance and endurance. But, keep in mind don’t put too many weights if your body is not ready yet, as it can result in back and legs injuries.
- Always in a Proper Body Position – If you are using the leg press machine, you should properly position your body to the 11’o clock posture and your legs to the 1 o’clock posture. The same thing with other machines requiring you to sit in the upright position with your knees is 90 degrees to your body axis. Next, start your exercise as guided for each machine.
- Cool-Down – Give your legs a proper rest after a long, intense workout. Usually, you can cool down the same way you warm-up by doing leg stretches, such as hamstring, calf, quadriceps, etc.
Some Ways to Improve Your Machine
- Add some weight bars. Though beginners shouldn’t start their leg exercise routine with a high intensity directly, you can increase the weight increment if you feel you have managed to understand the basics properly.
- Continue with some dumbbells or kettlebells workouts after doing your leg exercise routine. Do this as the act to complement the lower body exercise with some upper body exercise too.
- Avoid putting more stress on your dominant legs. Instead, try to keep the pressure balanced on both legs every time you exercise. This is also related to your body posture. A bad body posture will result in an inefficient exercise where only one of your legs will feel sore afterward. Start slowly if you still can’t grasp your proper body posture yet.
- Remember to take some short rests between your sets. This will help your legs to cool down a little bit before starting with the heavy lift again.
- Watch some exercise videos to get more variations of leg machine exercises and get the most out of your exercise routine. Watching some exercise videos will also help you to set your body in a proper posture.
With that all being said, you should start your fitness routine with your legs first before proceeding with other exercises. The leg machine exercises are usually more than enough to support your daily lifestyle if you combine them with proper cardio exercises and a balanced diet.
