When is the Best Time to Train Your Legs in the Gym

I combine martial arts training with strength training and the demands of my martial arts are very similar to those which football places on an athlete.

The way I approached this challenge when I was competing often and wanted to be in peak performance condition was to judge the effects my conditioning training was having on my sport. My sports performance was made the priority and all other fitness goals were judged to be secondary.

What I realised quickly is that a heavy leg training session on the day before a tough session of martial arts was counter-productive and made me not only less explosive but more fragile the following day. This was not ideal for injury prevention. The way around this was to do the heavy strength training after the sports training (later in the week - not on the same day). This worked relatively well and solved the problem I was having with recovery.

It must also be noted that you have to decide on your goals. Getting massive legs is not going to make you a better athlete, unless becoming "massive" is secondary to the actual training you are doing. The training must take the sport into account. For football, for instance, strength in the legs is not necessarily for direct performance advantage on the field. It strengthens the legs against the rigors of playing and training. It allows the legs to survive hard tackles and sudden changes of pace and direction.

For some medical background to this, it is worth noting that professional football players usually require joint replacement surgery soon after the ends of their careers and their careers always end due to a performance reduction caused by repeated injuries (and returning to training without letting injuries heal fully - at the microscopic level).

Often, you can return to normal performance well before an injury heals completely (and most professional athletes work in a constantly injured state), but using an 'unhealed' joint repeatedly under those circumstances leads, eventually, to permanent damage. The moral of this 'tale' is that injury prevention comes before performance advantages - when looking at leg conditioning for football and many other sports.

Thankfully, training for strength and injury prevention will still yield performance gains because you will get stronger. It is also worth noting that by simply avoiding training to failure an athlete can train hard with weights and avoid the burnt-out feeling the next day. Just avoiding the last rep or two which would have resulted in failure is enough to add a spring to your step the next day.

Under ideal conditions, the best time to perform leg training is the first day of the training week. If you train Mondays to Fridays, then Monday is the ideal day to train legs - if you are aiming for maximum bodybuilding and strength gains. But if you have a tough sports session on a Tuesday, this 'ideal option' is not so 'ideal' any more. If you cannot conveniently get your leg training into the first day of the training week - after your rest day(s) - I would advise you to do it on the last day of the training week, instead (so you can recover over the course of the rest day(s).

Lastly, how should you train legs as a football player? I would recommend heavy compound movements like leg presses and squats. But I think supporting exercises are also a good idea, such as lunges and walking lunges (if they agree with your other training and recovery), leg extensions and deadlifts.

Bodybuilders are led to believe that you are "not an athlete" and "you are not really training" if you do not do squats, deadlifts and bench presses as the core of your training exercises. Nothing could be further from the truth. Every single one of those exercises is dispensible and can be substituted - not just for athletes, but also for bodybuilders.

Note that not many of the Premiership footballers are impressively built. Some obviously don't even do any upper body gym work (studies have shown football performance is only improved by leg training - and upper body training has a negligible effect - if any - on performance on the pitch) so coaches do not make anything other than core leg training mandatory for contracted players.

The moral of this last paragraph is to say that the gym is not the be-all and end-all of football conditioning (when it comes to performance on the pitch). But it will give you an edge and it will certainly preserve your body for the short and long term future.

Idai Makaya
www.idaimakaya.com