Did you know that if you only train cardio and leave the force aside, you’ll be far from reaching your maximum potential in running or when you’re riding a bike? But let’s go further: if you train strength only with bipedal exercises (such as squats or buttock bridges), your training will remain incomplete.
For this reason, I propose an exercise to strengthen legs that cannot be missed in your running strength workouts: the Bulgarian Squats.
This leg exercise has 3 excellent benefits that make it very interesting when it comes to adding it to your workouts:
1. Increase the strength of your lower train in a movement similar to that of the stride, which will cause you to generate more energy in every step you pass and tolerate the burning of those last meters better.
2. Improves leg and core stability, which will make you able to have better body control and not waste energy with muscle imbalances or unstable movement of ankles, knees, hips, or core.
3. Being a single-leg job, its transfer at the neuromotor level will be very good. This means that training with this leg exercise will make us notice it significantly when we run later.
There are different variants of this exercise. To begin with, I propose this superseries of the video, to which you can add intensity when you have the movement under control, adding weight, instability, or varying the position of your body.
A good pattern to start is to make 3 superseries with each leg, resting 90 seconds between series. Do it at the beginning of your training, after you warm up.
Are you ready to take your running to the next level?