Strengthen your quadriceps — the muscle group at the front of your thighs — with a few exercises adapted from gym workouts that you can do in the comfort of your living room.
Some of the most common quad exercises in the gym are squats, lunges and machine exercises like the leg press. While you probably won’t have any weight machines at home, you can do squats and lunges.
For most people, a lot of weight isn’t required to get a good workout. Start with just your body weight, then incorporate weights or items around your house, like soup cans, full grocery bags or gallon water jugs.
The quadriceps (or quads) are the four muscles located on the front of the thigh. They pull together to help flex (or raise) the thigh and extend (or straighten) the knee.
The quads often become weak after an injury or surgery on the lower leg or thigh. For this reason, it is important to learn how to strengthen this muscle group for a complete recovery.
The quads are not tricky to target with your workouts. They’re the main muscles used to squat, perhaps the most popular exercise of all, so anyone who trains is likely to be working the quads regularly.
However, in a strange way that can actually mean you end up neglecting the quads to an extent, because they form a large muscle group with four heads and require more than squatting to target fully. Ideally you want to work the quads from different angles using both isolation and compound moves with a variety of rep ranges.
WORKOUT TIPS TO BUILD BIG QUADS
Squat deep
All those quarter squats might be good for your ego, but they aren’t maxing out your quad development. The quads are mechanically advantaged at the top of the lift, which means it’s easier for them to move weight. So squat as deep as you can with good form. Working below parallel forces the quads to work far harder and causes much higher levels of activation than quarter squats.
Get one-legged
“Single-leg work is great for stimulating the vastus medialis oblique or VMO, the teardrop-shaped muscle on the inside of the thigh,” says body composition expert Tom MacCormick. “This is because the opposing leg isn’t there to help stabilise and keep you in position. Without the aid of the opposing leg the working leg requires the VMO to kick in to aid stability, correct knee tracking and maintain alignment.”
Extend and flex
“Don’t ignore the leg extension if quad growth is your goal,” says MacCormick. “It causes high levels of activation in the rectus femoris, which flexes the hip and the knee. During squats the hip extension movement opposes the hip flexion function of the rectus femoris and limits its activation. But in the leg extension, no hip extension occurs, so the rectus femoris can achieve higher levels of activation.”
From 2008 to 2018, Joel worked for Men’s Fitness, which predated, and then shared a website with, Coach. Though he spent years running the hills of Bath, he’s since ditched his trainers for a succession of Converse high-tops, since they’re better suited to his love of pulling vans, lifting cars, and hefting logs in a succession of strongman competitions.