Leg day; it is both the bane of many fitness enthusiasts’ existence and also our greatest opportunity for growth. I’m not just referring to muscular growth either; attending leg day is a great indicator for how disciplined someone is. While I’ll admit that the excuses get pretty creative when it comes to skipping leg day, they are excuses all the same. So, sharpen those pitchforks as I’ll tell you why skipping leg day shows everyone how morally deficient you are.
Skipping leg day is commonly done to avoid delayed muscle onset soreness (DOMS). DOMS is particularly inconvenient in the aftermath of leg day because the soreness makes it difficult to walk, squat down to pick something up, or perform many other routine movements throughout the day. Although, few fitness enthusiasts seem to complain about DOMS following chest day or after hitting their biceps/triceps. Skipping leg day because it is inconvenient to deal with the soreness following day is antithetical to progress because it shows a refusal to go outside of your comfort zone. What other areas of life are you refusing to go outside of your comfort zone? Laziness hardly is ever confined to only one pursuit, just like how belief in conspiracy theories is hardly ever confined to just one theory.
Another common reasons that many people skip leg day is due to our sheer vanity. Admit it, few people outside of fitness savants look at or care about the strength of somebody’s legs. Skipping leg day, therefore, is an exercise (pun intended) in optimizing for vanity; train what will get the most attention. This is concept is so mainstream that even It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia made a punchline about only working glamour muscles. However, this optimization shows a true picture of how shallow you truly are; would you stage a house for sale by only touching up the siding and mowing the lawn, while not fixing any structural issues?
Let’s not lie to ourselves, leg day is hard. Your legs literally carry your bodyweight around during the course of normal activities such as walking. Therefore, your legs need significantly more load than your biceps would need in order to prompt your leg muscles to grow. Leg day is universally difficult because it needs to be difficult. However, leg day is necessary. Every time someone skips leg day, JFK rolls over in his grave. Are you that afraid of challenges that you’d even avoid a squat rack? If one would avoid a squat rack or leg press machine, then they certainly wouldn’t have the required discipline to work in sales, major in STEM, or to start their own company.
Skipping leg day is detrimental, not only will you be physically weaker because of your aversion to the squat rack, you’ll burn less calories too. Leg day exercises are well-represented in top-calorie burning exercises. Not to mention, leg day helps boost testosterone too (although it would be nice to see this study done with a larger sample size). For whatever it’s worth, skipping leg day also forfeits your status as The Man for two reasons. First, The Man would not back down from the challenge that is leg day, and secondly, The Man must always be improving.
Skipping leg day also shows a lack of commitment to the craft of fitness. After all, legs are, you know, half of your body. Why would you half-ass (pun intended!) your workout regimen? At the risk of falling into some faulty thinking, one must ask, what else are they skimping on? Are they skimping on other areas of fitness, such as cardio because cardio kills your gains (hint, it doesn’t. Here’s more proof)? Maybe their lack of effort spills into other areas of life; are you not giving 100% at work? Are they not fully present when they spend time with their loved ones?
Luckily, there is a cure for all of these woes. The answer is simple, though not easy; don’t skip leg day. Slowly but surely, you’ll spur on some new growth in both your physique and your outlook on life. Reject excuses and chase results. Choose yourself by choosing leg day.
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