Recovering from weak/skinny legs

[zbivins]

So I've been lifting for a couple years, and I'm coming to realize that my legs are disproportionately smaller than the rest of my body. It's not like I've been skipping leg day, but I guess I've been neglecting some of the major exercises for too long (squats and Deadlifts, mainly out of fear of injury). Regardless, I'm starting these exercises now in order cut my losses and move on. However, I'm trying to decide what/if I can do anything to make my legs be of the correct proportion faster. To do this, I was considering doing high reps (15+) for all muscle groups other than legs, so that my legs can catch up to the rest of my body, and the rest of my body will slow down but avoid atrophy. Does this make sense? Also, if anyone has dealt with something similar and found a better solution, any help would be greatly appreciated.

[SuffolkPunch]

If they are lagging then training them with proper volume and intensity will make them grow faster than the other muscles - so they will naturally catch up. It doesn't make sense to try to stifle growth of other muscles. Not that training in 15 rep range will do that, you can use a very wider range of different rep ranges to cause growth - in fact using a novel rep range will often spur growth more.

[D-Nutt]

Unfortunately, you've just got to suck it up and make it top priority and after a few months, you'll enjoy leg day.

My legs are naturally very skinny. I've been lifting for 25 years or so - and I'd say for the first close to 20 I would have made the same statements - I work my legs, I'm not neglecting them. But I wasn't really putting any true effort into improving them. Did half squats because my legs were super sore afterwards, so that must be working them properly. Skipped some leg days because my legs were sore . . .

About 5 years ago I started focusing on getting very deep in my squats, and trying to up the weight. Not trying to get to any outrageous weight, but I wanted to see that I was getting stronger. More importantly, I changed my mindset so that leg days were the most important day - if I was going to have to miss any bodyparts in a week, it wasn't going to be legs. For awhile, I went to hitting every bodypart in each workout, and that helped also. My legs are still probably a little skinny for my frame, but they are noticeably better than 5 years ago.

I think doing some running, treadmill, eliptical, whatever before working out also helps. I started doing that about 5 years ago also, just to get my energy levels up prior to lifting. 10 minutes usually. Maybe 15 or 20 tops. But doing that consistently will definitely make your legs stronger and more muscular; not sure how much bigger it will make them, but combined with the weight training, it should help.