Growing your legs in the gym can be extremely hard for anyone. It takes a lot of time and effort.
However, if you fall into the category of long legged lifters, it can make growing your quads even harder.
Well, it doesn’t have to be harder, but if you’re not doing what’s right for you, it can be harder.
What I mean by that is that the general rule of thumb to grow your legs is to train hard, have good form, and do exercises like squats and leg press.
This is great advice and it’s true. However, training with long legs requires a little more thought than training with average or short legs.
As a result, a leg growth routine, or more specifically quad growth, needs to be a lot different for someone with long femurs than it does for someone with short femurs.
That is, if you want to maximize muscle growth.
As a result, if you’re a fellow long legged lifter, there are some essential changes you may need to make to your leg days. This includes the exercises you’re doing and how you’re doing them.
The difference between long leg lifting and short leg lifting
For anyone out there lifting with short legs, conventional leg day exercises most likely work well for you.
This is because your legs are the right length to be correctly stimulated during most traditional leg day exercises. Your body moves in the path it’s supposed to and you don’t need to move outside of the proper range of motion to stimulate growth.
That being said, there’s nothing wrong with training long legs, it’s entirely possible for them to grow. It’s just that long leg mechanics work differently than short leg mechanics.
Meaning your body will move differently when you’re training, and getting the proper stretch during certain exercises while also maintaining proper form becomes more difficult.
For example, some exercises (like squats) might require someone with long legs to have a huge range of motion in order to get enough quad stimulation.
For some people this range of motion might be okay, however for others it could increase your risk for injury.
Everyone’s body is designed differently and has a different ideal range of motion. When training outside of that range, you put your surrounding muscles, joints, and tendons under extreme stress.
In the case of squatting, you would be putting your hips, knees, and lower back at the greatest risk for lifting injuries.
Common exercises that can make quad growth harder for long legged lifters
Squats
The most common exercise I see people doing to grow their legs are back squats. Squats are great for growing your legs. They allow you to load a lot of weight on the bar, are an awesome compound movement, and stimulate muscle growth in almost all of your leg muscles.
However, if you’re out there lifting with long legs, and are trying to grow your quads specifically, squats might not be your best friend.
Generally, the longer your femurs are, the less tension you will get on your quads while performing squats. This is because it’s much harder to get a stretch on your quads, since both your quad muscles and your femurs are so long. You’d need to squat extremely deep to feel more of a stretch.
The greater stretch you can get on your muscles, the more tears you can make in your quads.
Without this stretch on your muscles, it becomes extremely difficult to stimulate enough growth in your quads.
Because of this, squats won’t allow you to target your quads as much if you have long legs.
Conventional leg press
Just like squats, the leg press is another amazing pressing movement to grow your legs.
However, for someone with long femurs and shins, conventional leg press again won’t allow for as great of a stretch on your quads as other exercises would.
Because of this, in order to stimulate as much quad stimulation as possible, you’ll want to find exercises that properly target your quads.
Trust me, growing your quads is hard enough in and of itself. You need to be consistently training extremely intense, focusing on your form, and utilizing time under tension.
However, when you’re doing exercises that aren’t engaging your muscles to the max, it makes this process even harder!
This is why it’s so important to invest the time to find exercises that you know will work.
How to find exercises that target quads for long femur people
In order to find exercises that will properly stimulate quad growth, there are a couple things you can do.
First, you can either modify exercises you already know of. Things like squats and leg press.
Or, you can swap these exercises out for entirely knew exercises that target the quads better.
How to modify exercises as someone with long femurs
If you don’t want to add entirely knew exercises to your routine, I get that. Sometimes it’s better to stick with what you’re used to.
Instead, here are some modifications you can make to the exercises you’re already doing to help target your quads better.
Elevate your heels
Elevating the heels is one of my favorite ways to get a better stretch in my quads.
The way this works is that it changes the angle of your foot and your shin. This makes it as if you’re squatting extremely deep without requiring you to squat so deep.
Meaning that your range of motion increases in your knees, but the stress is put on your quads instead of your hips and lower back. Allowing your quads to handle the force and stimulate growth.
To do this, I put either ten pound weights under each of my heels, or put something like a 45 pound plate on the ground and place both my heels on it.
Then, you’ll want to focusing on applying force to the front of your feet, instead of your heels. Focusing on pushing off from the balls of your feet will even further engage the quads.
This gets such a huge stretch on your quads and allows you to get more out of your squats
Place your stance closer together
If you have long legs, then the further apart your legs are, the more you’re glutes will engage during a squat. Meaning that your quads will be less engaged.
As a result, if you want to engage your quads more than your glutes while squatting, you’ll want to place your feet closer together.
I aim for a little closer than shoulder width apart, but I’ve seen people with their feet as close as touching.
If you want to get the maximum stimulation out of your quads, you can even combine this with my last point.
This is my favorite way to squat when I’m focusing on quad growth. What I do is I place two weights on the ground but place them super close together.
That way my stance is close, and my heels are elevated. Allowing for maximum quad stimulation.
Change your foot positioning on the leg press
The positioning of your foot on a leg press determines what leg muscles you’ll target.
A wider stand with your feet placed higher will target your glutes and hamstrings. Whereas a closer stance with your feet placed lower will target your quads.
A middle width, middle height stance will target your glutes and quads pretty evenly.
That means that if you want to leg press for quad growth, you need to change the positioning of your feet.
You’ll want to put your feet as close to the bottom of the platform as you can, and a little closer than shoulder width apart.
Then, focus on increasing your range of motion and slowing down the movement.
The most common mistake I see people doing when leg pressing is that they fly through the movement.
However, the issue with this is that momentum starts to carry the weight for you. That’s why it’s so important to keep each rep slow and controlled. That way you know your muscles are carrying all the weight.
Other exercises for quad growth
If you’re interested in trying some new exercises to target your quads while having long femurs, here are some exercises you can try.
Sissy squats
These are another squat variation however you stand on your tip toes and squat forward. These allow for a really good stretch on your quads however they are difficult to perform.
They require you to stand on the very front of your feet and hold onto something while you perform the movement. This makes quad growth slightly harder since you need to focus on holding something and balancing.
Additionally, if you use a barbell, it’s extremely hard to do the exercise with very much weight.
Hack squats
Hack squats are another type of squat that allow you to get more tension on your quads. I like hack squats because the machine supports you so you don’t have to worry about balancing. This allows you to place your feet as far back as you want and as close together as you want.
Meaning you can get maximum quad stimulation and train to failure.
Weighted, walking lunges
These are pretty self explanatory. To perform weighted walking lunges, you do a walking lunge, but hold onto some dumbbells.
While doing these, you want to place your stepping foot close to you and push your knee forward as you’re lowering down. Again, this helps to increase the stretch you can get on your quads during the exercise.
Then, focusing on pushing off with your quads rather than your glutes.
Takeaways
Growing your legs in the gym is hard enough on it’s own. You need to be training with extreme intensity and getting as close to failure as you can.
However, as someone with long legs, the process can be even more challenging for you. Although it’s not impossible, you just need to find how to train for your leg mechanics.
These exercises and exercise variations are some of the best ways to start stimulating maximum quad growth.
If you pair them with training correctly, you’ll start seeing quad growth in no time!
More posts on women’s weightlifting:
Overcoming challenges women face in the weight room