The Step-Ups Exercise For Legs
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The steps-ups exercise is a great addition to any home leg workout. Here is how it’s done and how your legs and buttocks benefit from it.
Step-Ups
When it comes to leg exercises (you can do at home), people always talk about lunges or squats. Lunges are quite alright, but you may grow tired of them, while squats in my opinion aren’t ideal for someone who isn’t that experienced yet. So what should you do?
A neat alternative is are step-ups, which can be done with nothing but a chair and later on some added resistance:
I already said it in the video, but my inner safety freak makes repeat this: put the chair against a wall to be sure it won’t slide away from you. Doing involuntary splits while holding two 50 lbs dumbbells is not among the nicer experiences out there. It also goes without saying that you should use a chair that is able to bear your entire body weight plus what you use as added resistance.
What Muscles Do Step-Ups Work?
The main muscle the step-up exercise trains is the quadriceps on the front of the thigh, but it also involves most muscles of your bottom and a bit of the inner thighs and calves. A lot of bang for the buck.
Adjusting Difficulty
If you find doing the exercise with a chair too difficult, you can make the height you work against smaller by using a small step stool. If you have problems with balance, then it’s better to not try this exercise for now and first have a look at get-ups.
6 Comments
I was motivated to do a variation of this last Friday as my leg workout day! I worked them very hard. I was “rewarded” with a fearsome cramp in my left calf during the middle of the night that was quite exciting, lol!
Ouch! Hope all is well again!
Great, I just happen to be looking for a subsitute to lunges (I feel they stress my knees, even without weights)
Q: Can step-ups be considered a good leg-workout exercise for a beginner, or do lunges provide more complete leg training? Thanks!
In my opinion, both work equally well. I mostly advise beginners to start with the lunges because it doesn’t carry the risk of falling from a chair.
Am I supposed to feel stress in my legs when doing this because I did with weights but the problem is that I don’t have a high enough chair and all the chairs in my house are either too short or too high.
Yes, you should feel it especially in your thighs. If you don’t have the right chairs try lunges:
https://evilcyber.com/fitness/dumbbell-lunges/