Why is Leg Day So Hard?

The dreaded leg day. Anyone from the advanced lifter to the beginner has experienced just how brutal dedicating an entire session to legs can be. Gym sessions can always be challenging if you push yourself, but hitting legs hard is a different level of difficulty. Let’s take a quick dive into why that is.

If I know one thing is true in this world, it’s that two things build character. That’s manual labor and leg day to be exact, and both make you question why you started in the first place, make you sore beyond belief, and force you into a psychological battle with yourself wondering when it will end. However, both also leave you feeling with a sense of accomplishment, a rewarding moment in time that you know you wouldn’t have experienced had you not “sucked it up” and given it a shot. There’s a reason all of your gym bros (or gals) have reiterated the saying as old as time, “don’t skip leg day”. There’s also a reason people keep skipping leg day. Because it’s hard. LIke, really freaking hard, assuming that you’re pushing yourself. But why is that? The answer here lies in a couple of reasons.

Our Body’s Largest Muscles

 First, let’s take a look at the makeup of our body from a more general perspective: Upper Body & Lower Body. For those of you who skipped anatomy class, the lower body contains our largest muscles (sorry guy in gym that cares only about bicep curls). When we perform resistance training, our heart pumps blood into the muscles that we are working in order to feed them oxygen and nutrients during our workout (ie. the “pump that everyone is after”). So when we train our body’s largest muscles, which are found in our legs, this increased blood flow means our heart is working even harder to pump an adequate amount of blood to the muscles being worked. This process has blood flowing into your legs at a rapid pace, and your heart working even harder than normal to support said blood flow. This causes us to become exhausted, and is what makes that leg day feel so hard.

Our legs contain our body’s largest muscles

Compound Lifts

In order to explain the next reason leg day makes you contemplate jumping off a cliff, we’ll have to go into the basics of what a compound lift is compared to an isolation lift. A compound lift is a movement that involves working two or more muscles at once, thus the term ‘compound’. An isolation lift is, you guessed it, a movement that isolates and works a single muscle throughout the duration of the exercise. An example of a compound lift would be a squat, which works multiple muscles including the quads, hamstrings, adductors, etc. An example of an isolation exercise would be a bicep curl, which involves a single-joint movement and targets only the biceps. Now that we understand the basic differences between them, it’s easy to realize that a compound movement is the harder of the two. More blood is required to flow to more muscles in order to produce output from the muscle, making it more difficult than an isolation exercise. When we think about the plethora of isolation movements that we can do with our upper body, it’s easy to see how an arm day can be perceived as less taxing and stressing when compared to its counterpart. When comparing that to the traditional leg exercises that we think of, it’s much harder to target and isolate a muscle, meaning many leg exercises are going to be compound movements. Think of the squat, deadlift, leg press, etc. The limitations on isolated movements during our leg days is the other half of the story when we consider why those dreaded lower body days are so challenging. 

Rest & Recovery

One final element of the equation to consider is rest and recovery. A workout session is going to be far more challenging if you’re not recovered. When a muscle is worked under a resistance training context, our muscle fibers actually break down and need time to repair in order to recover. With our leg muscles being our largest, if they are properly worked and broken down, that means we have more muscle fibers in need of repair and recovery. This is the reason our legs get so sore compared to our upper body following a tough session, and is why it may take us longer to fully recover before we’re able to go at it again full-force.

Recovering from a challenging leg day takes us longer than other body parts

One thing is for certain, leg days are hard and there’s no getting around that. However, something I’ve found out from my own experience is that you can learn to embrace the challenge of it. I actually truly enjoy my leg days and enjoy the grind and exhaustion that comes with it. Sounds kind of terrible, but there’s nothing like the feeling you get after a tough leg day, barely being able to walk down the stairs and feeling the burn of every step. That’s the feeling of victory folks. 

If you want a plan that focuses on proper workout splits focused on training and recovery, check out my plans and programs at www.tolkfitness.com. For all of my leg workouts and more, look into becoming a member here: https://tolkfitness.com/product/become-a-tolk-fitness-member/ . If you have any questions, feel free to email me at dylan@tolkfitness.com