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The Real Reason Your Legs Won't Grow

Do you have stubborn skinny legs that aren't increasing in size? Does it seem like your legs won't grow no matter what?

We can't discount genetics since it's certainly a factor. Some people are just naturally blessed with more muscular legs and don’t have to train their quads, hamstrings and glutes quite as hard. Other people have naturally thin legs, and adding significant size is more challenging for them.

However, if you’re seeing consistent gains in your other muscle groups but you have lagging quads, lagging hamstrings or glutes, the reason is usually pretty straightforward.

Compound leg exercises are much more demanding on your body because the quads, hamstrings and glutes are very large muscle groups that are capable of moving a lot more weight than other muscle groups.

Even if they train with sufficient volume and use proper form with a full range of motion on their lifts, without realizing it, most lifters don’t train their legs within the same proximity to muscular failure as they do their upper body muscles, which are generally a lot easier to train.

For example, maybe you’re averaging one to two reps short of failure on most of your upper body lifts, but then you’re leaving four to five reps in the tank on your lower body sets on exercises such as squats, leg press, romanian deadlifts or hip thrusts because your body is under a lot more stress from having to move that larger amount of weight using your largest muscle groups.

The perceived difficulty of going, say, four reps short of failure on a barbell squat can feel the same as going two reps short of failure on a weighted pull-up or all the way to failure on an isolation exercise like a bicep curl.

Often, people cut off the set at that point. Even though the leg muscles that you’re targeting for hypertrophy have enough strength to continue, the total-body stress stops you from continuing. Therefore, you’re not training your legs as hard as you’re training everything else even though it might feel like you are.

If your goal is to maximize hypertrophy, then on the bulk of your sets, you should be taking your leg workouts seriously and aiming for one to two reps short of failure, three at most.

The next time it's leg day and you’re in the squat rack and you’ve got that loaded bar on your back and you’re uncomfortable and your mind is telling you to stop, ask yourself how many more reps you could truly squeeze out in proper form if you gave your maximum effort.

If the answer is any more than about one to two reps, three at most, then you’re just not training your legs hard enough, and you’ll need to mentally buckle down and start pushing yourself closer to muscular failure if you really want to build leg muscles optimally.