You’re not alone if you’re struggling to fit regular exercise into your weekly schedule. Juggling different responsibilities like work, life management, meeting family and friends, and concern for your overall well-being can make it difficult to keep up with exercise. But this bodyweight workout routine can build strength in your lower body in just five minutes.
The beauty of an off-equipment workout is that you can do it pretty much anywhere. If you’re using this as a quick home workout between tasks, you can load the workout video onto your TV screen to make it feel like you’re working out at a live workout class. Or maybe you’re using this as a quick warm-up before your next dumbbell leg workout and just need to plug in your best workout earbuds to keep up at the gym.
Workout Instructor Maddie Lymburner or MadFit (opens in new tab) as most people know online will walk you through various exercises designed to build strength and create muscle definition in your legs. You perform each movement back to back, spending 30 seconds on each exercise and resting 15 seconds in the middle.
It’s a short routine, so do your best to really build on it to improve muscular endurance in your lower body and tone your glutes, quads, hamstrings, and calves. To get the most out of this session, make sure to follow Lymburner’s demonstrations to perfect your form and avoid injury.
Check out MadFit’s five-minute leg workout
The workout includes some basic exercises that most people are familiar with, like squats and lunges, as well as several variations of these exercises. The benefit of using compound movements for strength building and a solid workout is that they engage multiple muscles at once. So not only are you targeting more than one muscle in your legs (the hamstrings, quads, and glutes), but you’ll also engage your core to help maintain good posture as you move.
Meanwhile, Lymburner inserts various impulses and heel or toe lifts into these bodyweight movements to intensify the overall workout and boost your strength gains. The best way to feel and see results is to stay consistent. Depending on your goals, you may want to move away from bodyweight routines and tackle resistance training with weights.
Once you’ve mastered a few key strength training tips, it’s worth investing in some of the best adjustable dumbbells to work out with. Using a modifiable weight means you can change the load during your workout; This is helpful for beginners who are still testing how much weight they can handle with different exercises.
These weights are also space efficient for a home gym and allow you to use progressive overload in your workouts. This is when you gradually increase the challenge of your workout to continually build muscle.
However, if you prefer to train without weights and want to build strength and muscle all over your body, why not take up these shoulder bodyweight exercises next.
