One of the most important things you can do to improve functional independence as you age and bolster your general health for years to come is increase the muscle mass on your legs. Lower body exercises like squats, lunges, and deadlifts, combined with a few accessories like heel raises and inner/outer thigh strengthening movements are essential for longevity, immunity, and decreasing your risk of falls, noncommunicable disease, and even cognitive decline.
Bodyweight exercises are a great place to start but can only take you so far
Building strength and muscle mass requires progressive overload. You must work through a few final reps that feel truly challenging. This means that you need strategies to increase the challenge to your lower body beyond bodyweight.
The exercises you’ve been doing for years—things like walking, hiking, yoga lunges, pilates, and barre classes—have likely brought you to a point of plateau. If you’ve maintained an active lifestyle doing these things, you’re likely as strong as you’re going to get with bodyweight alone, and living in maintenance mode. Worst case scenario, you’re gradually losing capacity with sporadic periods of decreased activity due to travel, career changes, illness, and other major life events.
Our lower bodies are meant to be very strong.
Our legs contain the biggest and most powerful muscles of the body. There’s tremendous opportunity here to build muscle mass, support bone health, and take advantage of all the benefits bigger leg muscles have to offer.
What are the health benefits of increased lower body muscle mass?
Adding muscle to your legs has sweeping health benefits across multiple body systems. Check this out.
Research suggests that increased lower body muscle mass is associated with:
- Improved balance: Bigger, stronger leg muscles contribute to better stability and balance, faster walking speeds, and faster reaction times. These improvements are crucial for preventing falls, especially in older adults.
- Maintenance of mobility and independence: Leg muscle strength helps with so many things in life. Standing up from low surfaces (restaurant booths, ottomans, a low toilet seat), getting down on the floor and up again, getting in and out of cars, going up and down stairs, even simple things we might take for granted like stepping in and out of your shower and standing up to bathe. Life gets easier and stays easier longer with leg strength.
- Improved bone mineral density: Strength, muscle mass, and bone density go hand in hand. When you transfer more load through your bones on a regular basis, and when you build bigger, thinker muscles and tendons to pull on those bones, they grow in size, density, and are less susceptible to fracture risk. Read more: Weight Lifting for Bone Density
- Better insulin sensitivity: Developing bigger leg muscles can improve insulin sensitivity, which helps regulate blood sugar levels. This lowers your risk of type 2 diabetes because more muscle mass can aid in glucose uptake by the muscles, leading to better metabolic health.
- Enhanced immunity: Muscle tissue produces and secretes cytokines and myokines (proteins released during muscle contractions) that can modulate immune responses. These substances help promote anti-inflammatory effects and improve the body’s ability to fight infections.
- Increased physical activity overall: Building muscle mass typically involves strength training and physical activity, which one could argue enhances all health-related systems of the body. Regular exercise is necessary to improve cardio-respiratory fitness and improved circulation. Possessing the requisite lower body strength and stamina to engage in more robust exercise can lead to massive improvements in fitness.
Even your aging brain benefits from having more muscle on your legs
- The muscle-brain connection: Studies have shown that higher levels of muscle mass, particularly in the legs, are linked to better cognitive function. This is believed to be due to the release of myokines, which are proteins produced by muscle that can influence brain health and cognitive processes.
- Brain health in an aging population: Research indicates that as individuals age, preserving leg muscle mass (and associated leg strength with increased walking speeds) can be crucial for cognitive health. Research suggests that older adults with greater muscle mass perform better on cognitive tests and are less likely to experience declines in memory and executive function.
If leg muscle strength really is the fountain of youth, where’s the best place to start building lower body muscle?
The mighty squat!
I know what you’re going to say. And yes, the struggle is real.
In my clinical experience as a physical therapist, people struggle with squats for a number of reasons. Barriers like…
- Knee pain and discomfort
- Ankle, knee, and hip mobility deficits
- Low back pain
- Difficulty using weight equipment to strengthen the lower body due to upper body deficits like grip and arm weakness, shoulder discomfort, and feeling awkward when you’re not used to holding heavy weights in your hands.
- How about… Some people just don’t like doing squats.
I hear you. And I got you.
The staggered stance target squat is one of the best exercises to begin building lower body muscle mass
While I strongly believe there’s a squat for everyone and a million different ways to squat, here’s a short video demo of one of my faves.
A few tips:
- Slow down your descent to make firm, controlled contact with your seat on a sturdy chair, bench, or stool.
- Make sure your sitting surface is not going to slide or roll on the floor.
- Placing a dining chair against a wall would do very nicely.
This set-up is especially valuable for my clients in their 60s and 70s who are exercising at home, limited by weight equipment options, and using lighter weights that are easier to manage with their grip and upper body strength.
What I love about this variation on a single leg squat:
- Moving between sitting and standing with a chair, bench, or stool is familiar, relevant to daily life, and an accessible starting point for most people.
- The emphasis on one leg at a time helps you load more weight on one leg. Because a greater portion of your bodyweight is transferred onto a single leg, you don’t need to add as much external weight to make this exercise appropriately challenging for muscle adaptation in the beginning.
- Biasing more weight through a single limb independently can reveal and help narrow any capacity gaps between your right and left sides.
- You get a bonus balance challenge. The feet are hip width apart (not on a line in tandem) so there’s just enough stability to complete your reps with a good amount of external load, without getting too distracted trying to balance. However, the strength demand on a single leg helps improve your balance and walking efficiency by targeting the muscles on the sides of your hips.
- This exercise can be gradually progressed for a greater challenge as your leg strength improves.
Next step: Increase the challenge to your lower body to continue building strength, muscle, and bone
The key to improving leg muscle strength is ensuring that the exercise is scalable over time. As I mentioned earlier, progressive overload and working through a few final reps that feel truly challenging are necessary for building strength and muscle mass.
The staggered stance target squat can be made more challenging in three ways:
- Using a lower surface as your sitting target.
- Staggering your feet by a longer distance front to back. Eventually exploring a light heel touch on the forward foot or a purely single leg transition (shown in the next video).
- Adding more weight.
The best part is you can choose from any (or all!) of the options above, depending on your current capacity and the equipment you have available.
Need more help getting started with building leg muscle strength?
If you’re local to New York City (Nomad, Flatiron, and Chelsea neighborhoods) we offer two in-person small group strength classes:
- Durability for Life: Practice Human’s signature small group strength class for seniors. Designed for ages 65+, those with hip and knee arthritis, osteoporosis or osteopenia, and/or persistent low back pain. All classes are led by doctors of physical therapy.
- Weight Training for Yoga: Our coaches draw from their personal, professional, and clinical experience working with common tendon and joint pain complaints in those who are nearing menopause, in peri-menopause, or post-menopausal, and have engaged in bodyweight modalities like yoga, Pilates, and walking for decades.
Looking to join us online? Check out our 15-week strength and cardio conditioning program for women over 40, The Slow Cooker.
Next on your reading list: Hip Pain with Menopause: Everything You Need to Know About Gluteal Tendinopathy
