T Nation

Lower Body Prioritization

Jim Wendler 5/3/1 Coaching
#1

I want to focus for a few cycles on adding some quality muscle to my legs. I have always been fairly skinny with very thin legs but decided to set a goal to really focus and prioritize adding some size. I admittedly trained liked a typical “bro” (bench and curls a lot) until switching to your program a couple months ago and now want to bring up my leg size.

I know that you recommend having a performance goal but frankly I have been self conscious about my legs for a while so I decided to bust my ass and work hard on this goal for the time being. I know that through time and lots of food this is possible, but what would you recommend as far as training? I figured lots of squats and single leg work but didn’t know exactly how to setup my training. If you have any ideas or thoughts about how i could set up a template, I would really appreciate it. Thanks Jim.

#2

We only focus on performance goals with the added benefit of becoming better people through “suffering for challenges” (which is a horrible way to put it but being uncomfortable should be a natural feeling). It goes FAR BEYOND getting big muscles. It’s about being a stronger person, physically and mentally and spiritually. Is this of any interest to you as a person? Do you want to take advantage of becoming more than a body part?

Just squat more often if you don’t care about that - run hills 4 days/week. Eat. I’ve written an exact workout for this, on this forum, in the past 2 weeks. it’s also in a bunch of books.

But I hope that you throw this idea away of associating yourself with the size of the body part and realizing physical challenges give you so much more. Wanting “big pecs” for training is like buying a race car and using it to go grocery shopping. Yeah, it’s doing a job but you are missing out on 100% of what it could be.

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