5 best unilateral lower body workouts
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. There is always more variety in lower body exercises than in upper body ones, given just how many major muscles there are. Starting from the glutes and going down the hamstrings and calves in the posterior chain to the hip flexors, and quads and tibialis down the front, it’s all lower body.
Add the lateral chain with the IT bands and the adductors and one has a lot to work on and choose from. I wrote about single-arm exercises last month in a Lounge article titled How To Get Stronger With Unilateral Upper Body Exercises, so this one is about the lower body. It wasn’t easy to narrow this list down to five of the best single-leg exercises, but doing all of these on the same day will make sure you hit every major muscle group and more.
Bulgarian split squats: This has to be on top of the list of any leg workout. The Bulgarian split squat is the holy grail of lower body exercises, given how easy it is to adjust the angle to switch from a quad-focussed to a glute-focussed rep. For those who haven’t tried this one yet, Athlean-X has a 4-minute video which takes you through each step, starting from the leg setup, the distance between the feet, the angles of the torso, and the techniques which change the muscle group focus.
“If you want to hit more of the quads then you will want to make sure you keep your torso upright throughout the entire movement. If you want to make this more of a glute focused exercise then you would want to angle your body forward (without rounding your low back) and maintain this slight lean throughout the set," says trainer Jeff Cavaliere in the video. Bench step overs: You can use a bench, a box, or maybe a stepper for this plyometric exercise that will help with
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