3 Single-Leg Movements You Shouldn’t Skip
by Zach Trowbridge on April 21, 2025Every leg day has its staples – leg curls, squats, hack squats, leg presses, Romanian deadlifts – where you can prioritize hypertrophy by moving substantial amount of weight.
But for many bodybuilders, the majority of their training stays on two legs at a time, with single-leg exercises only sprinkled in on occasion as a challenge (such as John’s infamous Bulgarian Split Squat Drop Set of Death), or done on machines after all the heavy work is done for the day (Smith machine lunges, single leg leg presses, or kneeling leg curls come to mind).
But single-leg training, particularly with free weights, can hold an incredibly valuable place in a well-rounded training program, not only because of the added muscle development that training one leg at a time can bring, but because they can help preserve joint health and maintain flexibility and mobility at the same time.
Here are three single-leg exercises that should be part of every bodybuilder’s repertoire:
#1: Front Foot Elevated Split Squat
This is an exercise that became a staple in the way I write training programs as a result of learning from Charles Poliquin – split squats of all varieties were core elements of his teachings, and the front foot elevated variation in particular is one of my favorites ends up in all of my clients’ programming at some point.
Poliquin taught a very unique way of doing split squats – most people teach a split squat to be a “down and up” type of movement where the back knee is dropped towards the floor, while the front leg’s knee stays behind the toes (what Charles would call an “elevator style split squat”), the Poliquin version (later popularized by Knees Over Toes Guy on social media) would focus on moving primarily through the front leg, staying fairly upright and driving the front knee forward until the hamstring of the front leg completely covers the calf. This results in a “down & forward” trajectory of the upper body, resembling somebody riding down an escalator.
The benefit to this execution is that it creates significant flexion under load at three joints – the hip, the knee, and the ankle, which helps to maintain joint integrity, especially at the knee in the vastus medius oblique (VMO), which is one of the primary stabilizing muscles in the knee. The VMO is most active in the bottom 15 degrees and top 15 degrees of knee flexion/extension, so by hitting full depth at the knee joint it allows the VMO to be recruited more heavily than a conventional split squat.
In addition, the back leg would be kept as straight as possible – not fully locked, but extended enough to create some length through hip extension in the eccentric part of the rep. This helps to lengthen hip flexors like the iliopsoas and rectus femoris.
Other benefits include loading the adductors of the front leg, especially the gracilis, and promoting internal rotation of the hips when trying to keep the knees and toes of both feet facing straight forward and keeping foot pressure distributed between the big toe, little toe and heel of the forefoot.
#2: Side Lunge
There are very few movements in a standard bodybuilding leg workout that work the frontal plane (side to side movement), and by incorporating an exercise such as the side lunge, it can again help maintain good joint health, particularly at the hip.
Usually, most leg exercises emphasize flexion and extension, and things such as abduction, adduction, external rotation and internal rotation are worked only as ways to promote more flexion and extension (such as the hip internally and externally rotating on the way down through a squat in order to reach full depth). However, shifting into the frontal plane allows those secondary patterns to become more prime movers, while flexion and extension take a back seat and become secondary patterns themselves.
This brings more secondary muscle groups like the glute medius, the TFL, and the adductor complex into a compound exercise, as opposed to training them individually with isolation work like hip adduction and abduction machines.
While the side lunge isn’t an exercise that will create lots of growth on its own, it can help to round out a program by making sure that there are no weak links in the 360 degrees of movement available at the hip joint.
#3: The Single-Leg Deadlift
The single-leg deadlift (or single leg Romanian deadlift, technically), is the only true single leg exercise on this list – with both of the previous exercises, the load on each leg is different, but there is contribution from each leg in some capacity on each rep. The single leg deadlift, however, is done with the non-working leg completely removed from the ground.
Being completely on one leg requires the most demand on rotation, requiring adequate rotation at both the hip and tibia in order to keep your center of mass over the planted leg. This does sap some of the potential for absolute loading compared to something more stable, but again, in this case the goal shouldn’t be the absolute load being moved, but exposing underutilized tissues in the hip and ankle to forces that they aren’t used to handling, which then helps them kick in to create a more stable platform to move load in a bilateral position (like a deadlift, rack pull, hip thrust, etc.)
I tend to recommend trying to incorporate some sort of less stable single-leg training such as the exercises above as a way to, as my friend Luke Leaman likes to say, “keep things neat and tidy” around the joints so that there’s more opportunity for muscle growth on the big leg day exercises elsewhere in the session.
If you’re struggling with joint issues in areas like the knees, hips, or ankles, integrating these exercises as part of a warmup, or as early movements in the workout. If you’re using them as a preventative tool, incorporating them in the middle or end of workouts tends to do the trick.
Zach is the co-owner and head strength coach of All Strength Training, a personal training center specializing in busy professionals located in Chicago, IL. He is also a competitive physique athlete, having earned his pro card in the WBFF in 2016, and currently competes in the NPC classic physique division.
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