@jdmhadto What about nordics, reverse nordics and full rom step ups then, would that be a good way up to leg calisthenics training that work your legs well enough? Not to a bodybuilder level, since optimal hypertrophy will only happen with weights and machines coking into play, but for a decent aesthetic physique?
@spitoutthekoolaid Nordics are great and can be used to develop large hamstrings. Some bodybuilders use them. But for the quads and glutes I just don't believe it is possible. What is aesthetic is obviously subjective. As a weightlifter I'm biased towards finding big legs very attractive/aesthetic - I'm lucky that my wife has naturally muscular legs haha.
When I think of aesthetic legs I picture at least the size of the lifters in this video but that's gonna be too big for some. I've never seen someone build legs 1/4 the size of what I consider aesthetic from reverse nordics and full rom step ups and I've seen a lot of people try. It depends on what you envision as being aesthetic for you. If you prefer the more top heavy gymnast kind of look then more power to you man
@jdmhadto Good point, but my general idea for aesthetic and most people, i think, is some amount of muscle definition with around 10-15% bodyfat leaness. With legs and glutes being at least proportional to the rest of the body as to not look frail in direct comparison, something very achiveable i hope, with cakisthenics and weighted variations. I also find big legs great, but i'm trying to hold to realistic expectation without a gym for now.
@spitoutthekoolaid As a Classics undergrad we often see Greek art depicting athletes with completely yoked legs https://medium.com/cma-thinker/anci...the-origins-of-the-olympic-games-23ceaf9bc37c
look at the first piece of pottery. We also see in the Homeric epics that the thighs were considered the most attractive muscle on a man. i forget which part of the Odyssey it is (around book 18 iirc) but Odysseus strips down at one point and every woman oggles his muscular thighs. The art on the pottery is exaggerated for stylistic effect but surely if they had such a culture of thigh love then they must have had some way of fulfilling their desires of having big thighs.
The obvious question is then how did they get big legs? Idk. I’ve seen amphora depicting athletes squatting with other athletes on their backs. That and they did a lot of 50-100 metre sprinting. Although I have seen a lot of evidence recently that weightlifting with sandstone stones with metal handles was performed at the olympics. They performed a kind of prototypical clean and jerk with one arm with one guy hitting 140kg apparently. So they may have just done zercher squats with sandstone stones
