Can You Do Chest After Leg Day? (Solved!)

The order in which you train your muscles can actually have a big impact on how effectively you move toward your fitness goals.

If you train your muscles in an order that doesn’t make the most of recovery time and previous workouts, it can make it harder to achieve your overall health, fitness, and strength goals.

After leg day, you’ll likely feel fatigued as you would’ve lifted a lot of weight to effectively work your legs.

Knowing what part of your body to target after leg day can be a challenging thing to decide.

So, in this article, we discuss whether you can do chest after leg day.

We explore the pros and cons as well as other useful information such as safety, the order of training, and whether other muscle groups could also be trained after leg day.

Can You Do Chest After Leg Day?

Yes, you can train chest after leg day.

During most chest exercises, your legs won’t activate so they can still recover while you make some good progress toward your fitness goals.

Chest is a pretty good follow-on from leg day as it moves the focus from the large muscles in your lower body to some of the large muscles in your upper body.

This ensures the working muscles have time to recover appropriately while still giving you a challenging workout elsewhere.

Benefits of Doing Chest After Leg Day

You Can Do A Heavy Workout Without Hindering Recovery

Ensuring your working muscles have sufficient time to fully recover between workouts is an important part of any training plan.

It can cause some problems though if you have limited time to go to the gym throughout the week but need to target all parts of your body.

By doing chest after leg day, you can have a heavy workout that focuses on your chest the day after you have had a heavy workout focusing on your legs.

As you’re moving the focus of your session from your lower body to your upper body, your leg muscles can recover as they need to while you can still do a heavy workout targeting your upper body.

This can help ensure you get all the workouts done in a week that you need to without hindering the recovery time of muscle groups you’ve already worked.

It Can Help Give You A Full Body Workout

Trying to train all the major muscle groups in your body can be a challenging thing to do in your training week.

By doing chest after leg day, you not only switch the focus from your lower body to your upper body but you help keep your training momentum going as you head towards a full body workout each week.

Training your whole body each training week can have great benefits for your overall health, fitness, and wellbeing, so finding ways to target different areas of your body is always something to see as a benefit.

Drawbacks of Doing Chest After Leg Day

General Fatigue

Your leg workouts will likely involve lifting heavy weights and doing some big movements.

This can leave you feeling fatigued and in need of a rest day.

If you do chest after leg day, you’ll be working two big muscle groups back to back.

While this can be suitable for some gym-goers, for others, the fatigue they feel after leg day could prevent them from performing at their best during their chest workout.

Should You Do Chest After Leg Day?

There aren’t too many reasons why you shouldn’t do chest after leg day.

You do need to be mindful of how your body is feeling, how much recovery time it might need, and how motivated you are to have a good workout.

As long as your chest is injury-free and fully recovered from any previous exercise, then doing chest after leg day is something that can be a great idea for many gym-goers.

Is It Safe To Do Chest After Leg Day?

It’s completely safe to do chest after leg day as long as you have enough time and energy to train your chest appropriately.

After leg day, you’ll likely be feeling quite fatigued so, if you think this is going to impact your chest workout, it might be a better idea to wait until you’ve recovered a bit more before targeting your chest.

However, if your fatigue is only being felt in your legs, then doing chest after leg day is safe, effective, and a common way of training for many gym-goers.

Is It Better To Do Legs After Chest Day?

As you’ll be switching the focus from your lower body to your upper body, the order in which you target your legs and chest isn’t as important as it is in other training combinations.

Your legs and chest don’t work together in many movements so the order you target them in shouldn’t make too much difference either way.

Other Muscle Groups To Train After Leg Day

Abs

Abs are a great muscle group to target when you need to give the larger muscle groups time to recover but you still want to train and make progress toward your fitness goals.

During most ab exercises, your legs won’t need to activate so they can continue to rest and recover while you can still have a challenging workout that targets your abs.

Arms

In a similar way to your chest, training your arms after leg day switches your focus from your lower body to your upper body.

This gives your lower body the much-needed recovery time it needs while you have a heavy upper body workout.

Your legs won’t be activating during most arm exercises so doing arms after leg day can be a sensible choice that can help you maintain your training momentum while still making sure you aren’t overtraining your working muscles.