The phenomenon began, as many do, with a post. There, in 2008 on the bodybuilding.com forum, a debate developed between users over the best way to work out, and devolved into an argument over the number of days in the week. If we’re trying to gain muscle, does the week have eight days or seven? And how should one plan out their lifts?
While there’s a general consensus on the first question, no conclusion was drawn for the second. Nevertheless, this lively exchange tells us a few things: When it comes to lifting, there has long been a discussion about what exactly we should do and when. Two, lifting was simpler then. And three, leg day was held sometime midweek—whenever that was.
Fast-forward 17 years and leg day has been assigned an unofficial day: Tuesday. There’s no rule saying people should train legs on Tuesdays, but leg day observance, approached with a seriousness somewhere between business and tradition, has become real. Think about it like a cross between new music Friday and Taco Tuesday. Lifting influencers, chain gyms, and the greater fitness-oriented community all uphold this schedule, as evidenced by the many “Leg Day Is Tuesday” captions and hashtags that litter the feeds of exercise enthusiasts.
Though it’s unclear exactly when Tuesday was adopted for these purposes, major bodybuilders may have had something to do with it. Franco Columbu, a former Mr. Olympia champion and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s longtime training partner in the ’70s, scheduled one of the two leg days in an advanced workout plan of his on Tuesdays, as described in his seminal work, Franco Columbu’s Complete Book of Bodybuilding. At this point, bodybuilding and lifting weights were niche fitness activities followed more by athletes who looked like Arnold than regular folks trying to get in shape. Films like Pumping Iron and books like Columbu’s helped soften the idea of heavy weights. (His book includes a history of the sport, a resistance training program for “the busy person or executive,” which is heavy on stretching, and a nutrition primer along with programming heavy weights.)
It wasn’t until 1998, when the workout chain Barry’s launched in West Hollywood, that this bodybuilder-inspired wisdom had a major conduit to reach the masses. The business scheduled its Lower Body Focus class—50 minutes of squats, snatches, deadlifts, and treadmill sprints that are essentially a leg day routine—on Tuesday. Twenty-seven years later, the class is now available at Barry’s 90 locations in 16 different countries worldwide.
Nowadays, the cult of muscle builders who observe leg day has proliferated, thanks to social media and the many studies that praise its health benefits. But even the lifting scene’s most clinical, objective members seem to observe it. Last summer, the popular science-based lifting influencer Jeff Nippard, who has over 7 million YouTube subscribers, posted a “scientifically perfect” leg day workout video. It consisted of some deadlifts, a leg press, a glute ham raise and some exercises on a machine. The video was posted late night on a Monday—just in time for Leg Day Tuesday.
It’s enough to make someone who’s never heard of a glute ham raise ask: Why is this a thing? So I posed the question to Zechariah Ghosttribe, who splits his time as a personal trainer in Brooklyn and as a touring musician with the band Angel Du$t. He explained that the concept makes more sense the swoller you get.
“When you’re starting out, it can be helpful to do squats every session just to practice the movement,” says Ghosttribe, who works out his legs, like Columbu, twice a week. “But a leg day for a guy working in an office trying to get back in shape is different from [one for] a bodybuilder or a powerlifter,” he explains. “The amount of work those lifters do can’t always be done more than once a week.”
Hence the one day-a-week thing. Ghosttribe designs programs for all types of clients—lots of artists and musicians—some of whom may not have lifted enough to limit their leg-work to a single day in the week. But those looking for especially intense, guided workouts—or punishment—can observe a single leg day with more weight, and less often.
“I used to do Barry’s like a lunatic,” says GQ columnist and How Long Gone podcast host Chris Black. “The Lower Body Day is extra brutal: You’re still running, and your legs never get a break.”
The intensity of those leg-centric classes is key, says Barry’s vice president of instructor education, Chris Hudson. The 27-year-old group-fitness company formed its educational identity out of founder Barry Jay’s own routine.
“He wanted to make group fitness feel like a workout that he would actually do at the gym,” Hudson says, adding that the exercises are rooted in bodybuilding.
Jay’s own workouts, like Columbu’s, focused on different body parts on different days of the week, and alternated between upper and lower body. As Hudson explains, it’s to “give one part of the body that was just worked an opportunity to recover and repair before you work it again.” And so, “Barry’s has followed a muscle split by day,” Hudson says, albeit modified, with classes offering a combo of cardio and weights. Arms and abs get the spotlight Monday, lower body comes into focus on Tuesday, and then the program is rounded out with a total body workout Friday—Taco Tuesday, Sunday Gravy, something in between.
Still, why legs on Tuesday? The answer goes back to days of the week.
“There’s a trope in bodybuilding culture of Monday being chest day,” says Hudson, “the never miss on Monday mentality.”
When combined with rest, and the upper-lower split, it fits squat day—or legs—in the day after bench. It’s not a rule, it’s just the way it worked out. (Black, for his part, now observes his non-Barry’s leg workout—barbell squat, hack squat, sometimes some Bulgarian split squats—mostly on Sundays.)
The most fascinating thing about this phenomenon is not just that it’s tacitly observed by a plurality of different lifters—it’s that legs tend to take place on Tuesday as a chore someone must get out of the way. People are “more comfortable doing upper body,” says Hudson, since “lower body can be scary,” because of the stimulus and coordination those bigger muscles need. Plus, benching is just more fun—another motivation for making it into the gym first thing on a Monday.
“I like benching a lot more [than squatting],” Ghosttribe says. “Chest and shoulders is my favorite. I’ll hit that on Monday, and that leaves legs for Tuesday.” (He is dedicated to the schedule. When Angel Du$t’s new single, “The Beat,” was released a couple of Tuesdays ago, to celebrate, Ghosttribe and Justice Tripp, the band’s singer, did legs.)
What was once a coincidental preference for some bodybuilders has now trickled down into a shared experience among less swole folks who just want to get strong. Are the best squats, like this video suggests, centered on Tuesdays? Probably not. But there’s no better way to break up the week than to train legs.