Although skinny legs may look nice in a skirt, they aren’t necessarily desirable if you need your legs to power through or carry you in your athletic endeavours. They can still look good, and have good muscle tone as well. After all, the name “Twiggy” actually means “looks like a twig or a stick”. That’s not exactly what you might want or need. Women do well to build strong legs to compensate for the lack of upper body strength inherent to the gender.
Plyometrics are exercises that you can do to strengthen and tone up your legs. This method works your hamstring, quad, calve, gluts, and heart muscles. It incorporates strength workouts, fast twitches, endurance, tone-ups, and stamina. You will burn fat in addition, as it is truly a cardio type workout. Plyometrics means, literally, jumping about.
They should be done regularly once a week along with your regular leg workouts. If you were to do 20 plyometrics after 20 leg extensions, then rest for one minute, and repeat all of this three times, you would get a full hard core leg workout. To intensify even more, you can skip the one minute rest in between.
Use the step machine as you usually would, but add in 15 plyometrics when you step off the machine. Go back and do more steps, then more plyometrics, etc. No resting between sets for this one!
Use a Swiss ball for stress positioning against a wall and bend at the knees, lowering yourself slowly until you are in sitting position with an invisible chair. Be careful to keep you back straight and supported with this one. You should feel the burn in your legs that will tell you that you are accomplishing muscle building.
