Strength train your legs to avoid "punk" look at the gym

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One of the most amusing things I see at the local gym is people who have enormous upper body strength but failed to strength train their lower body. This leaves them with a rather unbalanced musculature -- something that I call the "punk look." The punk look is what happens when you focus on bench press, curls, triceps, and other upper body excercises without strength trainig your lower body, and the punk look is surprisingly common, especially among younger males.

What people who sport the punk look may not realize is that their bodies look absolutely silly to those who are serious about strength training and overall health. In order to be healthy you have to have a balanced physiology that's made up of both lower body and upper body strength. Gym punks also like to cover their skinny legs by wearing extremely long basketball shorts. Doing this, they hope that nobody notices their legs and only looks at their upper body which is normally quite large.

This is what I call the "cosmetic approach" to strength training. It's the result of someone who is interested only in the way they appear and not their actual health. But it's even worse than that: avoiding strength training your lower body actually hampers your ability to build a strong upper body as well. Here's why: the largest muscles in your body are found in your lower body -- your glutes and hamstrings. By strength training these muscles, your body generates an enormous quantity of growth hormone. Once this growth hormone is circulating in your bloodstream, it actually enhances the growth of muscles throughout your body. In this way, working out your lower body actually helps you build more muscle mass in your upper body and gives you a much more balanced, healthy, fit look.

It's not just for looks, either: when you have a strong lower body, you are able to engage in more physical activities. You can jump higher, lift more, run faster, and basically be a more active, higher performing human being. Are you currently following a punk workout? It's easy to tell. Just look in the mirror. If your biceps are bigger than your calves, you're probably following a punk workout. You need to lay off the bench press and spend more time doing leg extensions, leg curls, squats, leg press, and other lower body excercises. Doing so will not only rapidly enhance your production of growth hormone and increase your muscle mass, it will also make you appear a far more balanced individual -- someone who is interested in holistic health, not just large biceps for showing off in public.
About the author: Mike Adams is a consumer health advocate with a mission to teach personal and planetary health to the public He has authored more than 1,500 articles and dozens of reports, guides and interviews on natural health topics, impacting the lives of millions of readers around the world who are experiencing phenomenal health benefits from reading his articles. Adams is an honest, independent journalist and accepts no money or commissions on the third-party products he writes about or the companies he promotes. In 2007, Adams launched EcoLEDs, a maker of super bright LED light bulbs that are 1000% more energy efficient than incandescent lights. He's also a noted technology pioneer and founded a software company in 1993 that developed the HTML email newsletter software currently powering the NaturalNews subscriptions. Adams is currently the executive director of the Consumer Wellness Center, a 501(c)3 non-profit, and pursues hobbies such as Pilates, Capoeira, nature macrophotography and organic gardening. Known on the 'net as 'the Health Ranger,' Adams shares his ethics, mission statements and personal health statistics at www.HealthRanger.org


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