Leg Warm Ups

Series Summary

Many people want to lose weight, and despite claims for quick fat burning pills and powders, the best way to lose weight is still through proper diet and exercise. Exercise does more than just maintain physical fitness though. Working out can also help build healthy bone density, muscle strength, and joint mobility. It can also reduce your general health risks, boost the immune system, and help with depression and insomnia. Whether your reason for exercising is to lose weight, or improve muscle mass, working out is always a good idea to help promote the health of your body and mind. In this free fitness video series a certified personal trainer, Noah Steinberg, will demonstrate several leg exercises. Steinberg will begin by introducing a general warm up in order to increase blood flow and stretch out the leg muscles. He'll then demonstrate several leg stretches to help loosen and strengthen the legs. Steinberg will demonstrate how to perform lunges, squats, leg presses, leg extensions, dead lifts and several calf exercises. Watch these videos and begin strengthening and stretching the leg muscles today.

Video Transcript

"So I am now going to show you how to safely and effectively go through a leg workout so we are going to start with a warm up. Before every workout you have got to do a proper warm up so you don't get injured. I have a form roll here and you can probably find these around your gym and what these are used for is to relax the muscles just so they are ready to go and just so you are not tight so I like to do a couple of things here and you are going to find out if you have any areas here which are problem areas and you can really just figure out how to go about it with a form roll. For me I have tightness in my IT band right around here and in my hips so you just roll it around like this and you are going to want to find a point that feels like it kind of hurts when you run it over that. It is kind of like a knot in your muscle so hold it there for about five to ten seconds and then keep it going and then maybe just roll up and down the area once or twice. Another problem area for me is just the front of my quads so you would just do it like so, set the form roll there, just lean over it, come up and down and find an area that hurts, right there, hold it for about five to ten seconds and then keep it moving. That just loosens up the muscles so I just did some form rolling and you might want to do a little bit of stretching and also what I would definitely do is to do some cardio on top of that just to get the blood pumping, oxygen flowing and just warm up the muscles a little bit more and increase your body temperature so I just usually go at it at a pretty moderate pace. I am just going to use about three and a half to four inclines at a three and a half to four speed and do that for about 10 to 20 minutes and that should be good enough in getting you warmed up here and ready for a leg work out."