Rebuild Your Leg Strength Without Weights

It doesn’t have to be squats:

Three ways to do it

Age-related leg weakness is largely driven by sarcopenia (the gradual loss of muscle mass and strength), is not an unavoidable side-effect of getting older, and walking alone usually doesn’t provide enough resistance to maintain or rebuild strength.

Why walking isn’t enough: walking is fabulous in many ways; it improves endurance, cardiovascular fitness, and mobility, as well as being great for mental health, but it doesn’t challenge your leg muscles enough to stimulate substantial strength gains, especially in your quadriceps and glutes, which are critical for good posture and stability.

With that in mind, here are three bodyweight exercises that help more than you might expect:

• Sit-to-stand: sit on the edge of a firm chair with your feet flat on the floor, keep your back tall, lean your nose over your toes, stand up without using your hands, then lower yourself back to the chair at about half the speed you stood up.
• Step-up: place one foot on a low step, step up until both feet are on the step, then lower yourself back down slowly, while keeping your hips level and your back tall.
• Wall squat hold: stand with your shoulders and bottom against a wall, place your feet 12–18 inches from the wall, slide down until your leg muscles feel challenged and/but without causing knee pain, then hold the position while breathing normally.

Do them as best you reasonably can to start with, and then make one small improvement each week by doing such things as adding a repetition, adding 5 seconds to a hold, slowing the movement slightly, or increasing the range of motion.

For more on all of this plus visual demonstrations, enjoy:

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Want to learn more?

You might also like:

Walking: Have We Had It Backwards? ← this is a hack that makes walking a lot more beneficial as an exercise (and why), with the caveat that it can’t reasonably replace all of your walking.

Take care!