30-Minute Gym Leg Workout for Women Over 40 and Menopause

Nikkiey: What's going on, you guys? Welcome back to another workout video. Today we are going to crush some legs, and I'm super stoked to bring you guys on this journey today.

To get into this workout today, I'm going to start with a warm-up for my core and stabilizing my core. A little context here: for the last month, month and a half, I've been working with a chiropractor, mainly to focus on the soft tissue in my shoulders and in my traps. I hold a lot of tension here, and I want to keep the progressive overload going with my shoulders. But a part of that is being able to stabilize my core and being able to sit back, as I just did there, instead of being out like this. So I'm going to warm up my core first. We're going to do two specific exercises and then we're going to get into it. Let's go.

All right, to start, the first warm-up exercise for core stabilization is dead bugs, but also doing a Y raise at the same time with my arms. The goal here is to keep the resistance band at the bottom of my back. If it rolls up, it means I'm not pushing my core to the ground.

Core. And at the same time, when you're doing that movement, you have to get your arms down to the ground and your foot down to the ground at the same time, while keeping the core pushed into the ground. And breathing. So you've got to focus on a couple of things here, but the most important thing is getting that core stabilized.

Here's another one that I'm going to show you. I'm going to do a bent over, still engaging my core, and I'm going to do a Y raise. I'm going to hold here and make sure my neck is back for 10 seconds. What you've got to do is push your stomach back into your tailbone, engage your core, bend over, keeping that nice and tight, and then arms out to a Y. See how my neck is forward like that? It needs to be back. This is so challenging, at least for me, because my shoulders are so tight. It's brutal.

Okay, what we're going to do is start with some tempo work, and I'm going to focus on a two-second drop and then a two-second coming back up.

Okay, let me get under here and feel it first. It feels nice.

Okay. This is a machine, a piece of equipment, that I can't say I've ever used, maybe once or twice in my whole lifting career, and that weight just surprised the shit out of me. So we're going to lower it and see how this feels.

Nice. Nice. So smooth. Dropping it in half made a drastic difference, and I can focus on good quality form. There's no way I would have been able to drive it. I would have been throwing that weight up, and I probably would have hurt myself at some point. So always pay attention to that, guys. Don't try to be the person in the gym who's lifting the heaviest weight just because. Proper weight, proper form, engaging the muscles, putting resistance on the muscles: that's all you need.

Sometimes I like using machines rather than a barbell. A Smith machine, for instance, and this type of equipment, allows you to really focus on the movement, and you can feel when you're not in good form. You've got to pay more attention to proper form with a barbell, especially with the weight on your back.

Getting into the next set, 10 reps again. We're doing that tempo, two seconds down, two seconds up. Even like this, sometimes people look like that. You can see an arch in my back here. But watch: push it in, head back, which I didn't do on the last set, and go into the motion solely focusing on the quad, the glute and the hamstring, and my back is well supported. Talking through that, I forgot to do the tempo, so here we are focusing on the tempo.

I think I'm at 10, but I'll do one more just in case. Guys, you know the weight is good when the last two to three reps are a challenge, where you're like, can I actually push this up? Can I actually get it? Am I going to drop it? That's when you know you're putting solid stress on the muscle, and with solid stress and solid resistance on the muscle, that's where you're breaking it down. Then post-workout, when you eat right, sleep right and hydrate, that's where the building process happens. But you've got to do this part first and marry it with the second part, and that's how you get toned, that's how you build muscle, that's how you get results.

Heart rate's at 150 right now. If you don't have this massive contraption at your gym, one, you can do what I was originally going to start with, which was the leg press, but that was taken at the time. Two, you may have a normal hack squat. This is a slightly different variation of a hack squat, so that would be a second option. Third, you could do a normal squat with a barbell or a goblet squat with a dumbbell. Those are some good variations. Last set, best set.

Oh, yeah. On to the next. We've got some lying hamstring curls. Let's go. Psych. I guess everybody just wants to vibe today. Everybody wants to do leg day today. The lying hamstring curl is taken. But as I was getting off this machine, I saw this, and this looks juicy. It's a single-leg lying hamstring curl, and we're going to jump on it. This weight feels probably a little light on the single leg, but we'll feel it out for a couple of reps.

Okay, so I ended up testing it out and realizing in the first three reps that it was going to be solid enough for me to do a full set. It definitely was solid enough for me to do a full set. So here we go. I'm going to go on to the next leg and do 10 reps.

Okay, so I tore my ACL two times. The second time, they actually used a piece of my left hamstring to repair the tendon. This left hamstring is so much weaker than my right hamstring. So here's how I approach it: if you have a muscle imbalance, or you've had an injury in the past to a leg or an arm, the way you can rehab and grow back that specific muscle to be stronger is by doing single-leg or single-arm exercises.

So me doing a single-leg lying hamstring curl, while I hate it because I recognize every single time how much weaker my left hamstring is, can seriously improve the imbalance. The way you would go about it is to pick a weight that the left leg is able to do, and that is still a challenge for it. I'm happy that it worked out for me here. The right leg will be like, oh, this is so boring, I can get through the reps so easily, but that's how you're going to balance it out. Then you've got to be consistent with that, obviously, and you'll find that the left leg, or that weaker muscle group, gets a lot stronger, and there will be an alignment with the muscle on the opposite side. That's how I would approach a muscle imbalance or that type of injury. Here we go, second set.

When I'm doing compound movements like squats or deadlifts or other exercises, my right leg will, the majority of the time, overcompensate for my left leg. After years of lifting, I think that's why I'm having some tightness in my body, specifically, as I was sharing, in my shoulders and my traps. I think my entire body, at some point, this side has been overcompensating for my left, and it's starting to take a toll in other areas. So I'm trying to get ahead of it as much as I can, because I've been lifting for so many years, and I'm trying to fix it and get more mobility and more flexibility. But yeah, it always overcompensates.

Okay, that's over. Last set, best set, done. On to the literal worst yet best exercise. Worst because it is absolutely grueling, best because it's very impactful for growth and muscle development. That is the Bulgarian split squat. Here we go.

All right, so for the first set here, we're doing three sets of eight reps on each leg and really trying to do my best with this tempo work. I might not have said this earlier, but the reason I'm doing tempo work is that it's part of a progressive overload technique. A couple of weeks ago, I started with a four-second tempo. Then I moved to a three-second tempo. Now I'm at a two-second tempo. Next week I'll do a one-second tempo, and then I'll try to increase my weight in the fifth week, as that is another aspect of progressive overload. These, though, are typically hard for me to do with a two-second tempo, because I feel like my legs are going to crumble and I'll fall to the ground.

It's very important to do hard things to test your level of resilience. Two, it's important to do hard things in lifting weights so that you can get stronger. Three, you gain new levels of confidence in yourself. And four, it's important to do hard things because, in my opinion, if you're not doing hard things, you're not growing. Growth is a very important value of mine in life. I don't want to be complacent or not growing. So doing hard things is really important to me, and important in general. Resilience, getting stronger, confidence and growing: that's why it's important to do hard things. All right, next set.

Okay, what some people do is go like this. Look how curved I am. That's putting a lot of pressure on my lower spine. What you need to do is create a C-curve and push your core to your tailbone, and then go into the movement keeping a nice C-curve in your spine, because my core is very engaged here.

Remember to breathe during these exercises, because if you don't breathe, that's probably why you feel a little lightheaded, like I do right now.

Why do a lot of women not want to go to the gym? I can see a couple of reasons why women are afraid to come to the gym. One is that they don't really have the confidence, and I think this has been more of a man's sport. I think that's slowly changing. The narrative is slowly changing as more women show up to the gym and gain more confidence, and it's becoming a woman's arena as well.

So if you're afraid to come into the gym, here's what I did. Pro tip: I wore a hat, because the hat created blinders for me. I couldn't see people looking at me, people couldn't see me, and it allowed me to stay in my zone, walk in, do my workout and get out. That was one aspect. The second aspect is that I literally studied my workout the night before. I would sit down at my kitchen table, look at my workout for the next day, and any exercises I didn't know how to do, I would literally YouTube or Google how to do them. When I got to the gym, if I still didn't feel confident with specific exercises, I would quickly look at that video again. That alone helped me gain confidence, and I just went into my workout. So, two things: if you're afraid to go to the gym, wear a hat, and do some work and study your workouts, and you'll feel that much more confident going into the gym. I think I stalled my rest period long enough here.

Not going to lie, I really placed the importance on the tempo there. All right, guys, that's a wrap for the Bulgarian split squats. Rest in peace, my legs. Just kidding. On to RDLs.

The pump I enjoy the most currently, because I think it's changed every year that I've been lifting, is the glute pump, to be honest. Might be TMI for YouTube, but it's nice to feel a little pump in your butt when you're walking. It used to be my shoulders. I freaking loved having a shoulder pump. But as I've been sharing frequently throughout this video, my shoulders have been hurting for, I want to say, eight months now.

I've been doing my exercises with my chiropractor, and I've got to do them at night by myself. I've got to do wall angels. I've got to push my core into the wall, push my chin back, go up, hold at the top and come back down, and I've got to do six sets of ten reps. I did them two nights ago in my apartment, and I had a shoulder pump at the end. That's how bad my shoulders hurt. Body weight wall angels sound super easy, right? No, it hurt. Shoulders are not my favorite pump anymore. So my current focus is getting my shoulders better.

My sleep last night, in terms of recovery, was honestly the worst it's been in a couple of months. If you follow me on social, you know I pride myself on having an HRV of 130 or 140 on a regular basis. Last night it was at 63. Sixty-three. It looked like I was flatlining at the beginning of the night, and I did nothing different yesterday other than film content. We had dinner with the guys last night. Maybe it was because I ate a big dinner right before going to bed, but I've done that before and I've never had that low of an HRV. So I think that's having an effect on today's workout.

Doing that set, I was thinking about a really good superset if you want to walk around with a booty pump: Bulgarian split squats supersetted with RDLs. That's a fire booty pump. Okay, last set.

Okay, that's it for the RDLs. Next, we're going to do the final exercise, the one I shared with you at the beginning. It's going to be an AMRAP, as many reps as possible in a three-minute period, for lunges. Let's go get it. Three minutes of lunges.

It's like fucking 40 reps right now.

All right, honestly, that was a lot easier than I anticipated. I'm like, I could go straight into two more minutes. They feel good. They've got a juicy pump. That was a good leg day. RIP legs. I'm not trying to mess around with my recovery. Sixty-four minutes. It's a little bit long for a leg day because we were filming. Pretty solid.

I don't want to get into the calories. Fuck the calories, you guys. Don't get obsessed with the calories on your fitness tracker or your watch. They don't know your metabolism. They know nothing. They're going off your heart rate and the time you've been in the workout. Watch your heart rate, though. Throughout, make sure it's up and you're feeling challenged, and that it's not down and you're just going through the motions. That's a good way to measure whether you're challenging yourself in a workout.

So, all that being said, guys, that's leg day. Go try it for yourself. Like, comment and subscribe, and I'll see you in the next one. Peace out.