Unit three supplementary materials
Leg curl: Advantages and Disadvantages
Advantages of Using Leg Curls/Leg Extensions:
1. You can focus on the target muscles more selectively. When doing squats, you hit a lot of muscles at once and expend a lot of energy. With the leg curl or extension, you can target only the hamstrings or the quads, giving all your energy to that muscle group. This can be especially important for the hamstrings, which are often neglected.
2. You can work that target muscle more intensely. Because you are focusing more tightly on one muscle group, you can increase the intensity for it.
3. Leg curls/extensions are easier. Since you are using less muscle mass, the exercises are easier to do. They won't affect your whole body the way squats will. Squats will use up a lot of energy.
4. These two exercises are far easier to learn and are less technique-intensive than squats. Any beginning trainer can do leg curls or
extensions but not everybody can jump right in and do squats. Being easier, they are also useful for more advanced trainers in the later stages of a workout where you are already fatigued and squats may not be the safest exercise to do.
Disadvantages of Using the Leg Curl/Leg Extension:
1. They are isolation exercises. Because they only work one muscle group, they won't have as much of an effect on real-world strength. There aren't any movement you do in real life that are done in isolation, like the curl or extension movement, however you do squat-like movements all the time.
2. Being isolation exercises, they don't address the functions of the muscles as an integrated system the way squats do. This can lead to imbalances if you do only these movements exclusively.
3. Leg extensions can be harmful to your knees. The position of your legs in the exercise places a lot of torque on the connective tissue in the knee joints. Heavy leg curls, especially if you use momentum, can really mess your knees up. Back off on the weight and focus on the squeeze instead.
4. They normally require very specialized machines. These machines aren't normally cheap! You can, however, improvise both of these exercises using dumbbells.
