Looking to seriously challenge your lower body without leaving the comfort of your living room? You’ve come to the right place. These 25 leg exercises at home require just your bodyweight—no heavy weights, exercise tools, or gym membership required.
First, though, why does leg strength matter? Put simply, having strong legs is super important for achieving fitness goals and for making everyday life feel a little bit easier. Think about it: Whether you’re deadlifting a heavy barbell, running a marathon, walking up a flight of stairs, or simply picking up a squirming toddler, you need leg muscles to get the job done. And the stronger those legs muscles are, the better job you’ll do.
Fortunately, leg exercises don’t have to be complicated to be effective—and they don’t need to require any equipment either. There are plenty of bodyweight leg exercises you can add to your at-home workout routine that will help you improve your strength in daily life and get closer to your fitness goals too.
“Bodyweight exercises are realistic and functional, meaning that they help us strengthen our muscles that we use in our daily lives,” Jess Sims, a certified personal trainer and Peloton instructor, tells SELF. “For example, when we squat we are essentially sitting down into an imaginary chair, which will help improve our posture when we actually sit in a chair. When we stand up from a squat, we drive through our heels and brace our core—we are essentially building great habits that translate into our lives outside the gym.”
Bodyweight leg exercises are also valuable for learning proper form before you add weights to certain moves. “We shouldn’t be using weights until we’ve mastered basic lunge, hinge, and squat movements without weights,” Sims says. Another bonus of bodyweight moves? “You have your body all the time, and it’s free to use, so you can do exercises anywhere and at anytime!” The best lower body workouts are the ones you’ll actually do, right? So if you’ve got an arsenal of moves that you can literally do anywhere, there’s a better chance you’ll fit them into your routine.
The leg-strengthening exercises below will help you build strength while also preparing your body to do more complex moves with weights. Give them a try on your next leg day workout and embrace the burn.
How can I work my legs without weights or machines?
One easy way to make legs exercises with no equipment feel challenging? Incorporate single-leg work, Ava Fagin, C.S.C.S., sports performance intern coach at Cleveland State University, tells SELF. Single-leg moves, also called unilateral moves, require you to rely on the strength of just one leg to perform a movement, which means they often feel more intense than bilateral moves (moves done with both legs). So adding moves like lunges, single-leg glute bridges, and single-leg calf raises to your at-home leg workouts is a really easy way to up the strengthening ante.
You can also increase the challenge of bodyweight leg exercises by introducing explosive movement, Fagin says. Moves like pop squats and jump lunges are good for working your legs, developing your power, and perhaps introducing a little bit of cardio too.
When doing bodyweight leg work, it’s important to incorporate both hinge variations, like good mornings, and squat variations, like squats and lunges. Hinge exercises primarily target the back of your legs (including your hamstrings and glutes) while squat exercises primarily target the front (including your quads), Fagin explains. So by incorporating both types of moves, instead of just homing in on one, you can work more muscles in your legs and get more well-rounded leg workouts.
Important caveat: If your goal is to build serious strength and muscle, bodyweight exercises alone aren’t going to cut it. “Our muscles can only really grow and strengthen if they’re overloaded,” Fagin says. And often that overload comes from adding weight. That said, bodyweight exercises are good for boosting strength endurance and muscle endurance, Fagin says. They are also a great way to work on your form since you don’t have to worry about weights or any equipment and can instead focus fully on solid technique.
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What’s the hardest leg muscle to work?
It’s tough to say what’s the hardest leg muscle to work since that can really vary person to person, Fagin says. But in general people sometimes struggle to work their smaller muscles. And one smaller but super important lower-body muscle is the gluteus medius.
Located on the outer side of your butt, the glute med is part of a group of muscles called hip abductors, which are responsible for moving your legs to the side and away from your body, as SELF previously reported.
“The glute med is one of the most important muscles in your lower body in terms of stabilizing your hips,” Fagin says. “When people have a weak glute med, they often have back problems and hip pain and then it just works its way up.”
That’s why “it’s really important to not neglect your glutes and your glute med in general,” Fagin says. You can target your glute med with exercises that involve diagonal and/or side-to-side movements, like lateral lunges and curtsy lunges. You could also get the job done with a quick yet effective glutes finisher, like this one.
How can I do leg day at home?
To build a solid at-home leg workout, alternate between hinge movements (like the good morning) and knee-dominant movements (like a lunge), Fagin suggests. It’s also a good idea to alternate between bilateral moves, like squats, and unilateral moves, like single-leg glute bridges, she adds. And even though your focus is a lower-body workout, Fagin suggests incorporating some light core exercises and upper-body moves as well, especially if you are doing your workout in circuit formatting without a lot of rest between moves. Engaging your core and arm muscles can give your leg muscles a break and make your workout more efficient. (Planks can fill this role.)
There’s no magic number for how many leg exercises at home your workout should include, but four to seven moves could be a solid place to start for an at-home beginner leg workout. In terms of volume, beginners should start with 2 sets of 12 to 15 reps for each exercise, Fagin suggests. From there you can work your way up to three sets and eventually four, if you’d like to.
As for how long your workout should last? Aim for 20 to 30 minutes. “There’s a ton you can do in 20 to 30 minutes,” Fagin says. Of course, you can extend this time as you get stronger and progress. No matter how long your leg workout is going to be, make sure that you pencil in a 5- to 7-minute warm-up beforehand. The warm-up, says Fagin, doesn’t need to be complicated—as long as you pick movements that raise your body temperature, mobilize your joints, and activate your muscles, you’ll be good to go.
Last tip: If you experience post-workout muscle soreness after a leg-day workout, make sure to wait until the soreness subsides before you tackle another leg-centric routine. In general you should wait at least 48 hours before working the same muscle group in a subsequent workout. (It can also be helpful to do some leg stretches during an active recovery day to improve mobility.)
Demo’ing the exercises below are Amanda Wheeler (GIFs 1, 7, and 20), a certified strength and conditioning specialist, Helen Pries (GIFs 2, 4, 6, 9-10, 12, and 16) a model, Nikki Pebbles (GIFs 3, 11, 13, 18, and 25), a New York City–based fitness instructor; Cookie Janee (GIF 8), a background investigator and security forces specialist in the Air Force Reserve; Teresa Hui (GIFs 14 and 22), a native New Yorker who has run over 150 road races; Shauna Harrison (GIF 15), a Bay Area–based trainer, yogi, public health academic, advocate, and columnist for SELF; Grace Pulliam (GIFs 21 and 23), an aerial yoga and Vinyasa yoga teacher in New York City, and May Yu (GIF 24), an avid yogi and gardener.
The Exercises:
Source: https://www.self.com
