“You know why I pulled you over, sir?” YouTuber and bodybuilder Sam Sulek said, staring into the camera with his aviators on. “No, you tell me. You tell me why I pulled you over.” He paused, then answered his own rhetorical question. “It’s because you were skipping legs. It’s because you were skipping legs, goddamn it. Let’s be real. The most skipped, the most neglected, and frankly, one of the fuckin’ most badass muscles on your whole frame. … In no way imaginable, as [an] at least reasonably serious, dedicated lifter, should you ever catch yourself skippin’ ’em. Oh my goodness. Not cool, man. Not fuckin’ cool. I know I’m not gonna.”
The date was July 23, 2024. The title of the video was “The Bulk Day 36—Legs—DO NOT WATCH IF YOU SKIP LEGS.” And Sulek, not for the first or last time, was taking leg-day skippers to task.
The 23-year-old Sulek, who won his first bodybuilding show (and his IFBB pro card) in February, has amassed almost 4.5 million YouTube subscribers, which makes him one of the platform’s most popular bodybuilding and fitness influencers. He has almost 7 million followers on Instagram (where he only sporadically posts), in addition to more than 2.5 million on TikTok, where he started posting before his YouTube debut. He’s amassed his huge YouTube following—generating almost 310 million total views, almost 12.5 million total likes, and almost 750,000 total comments—in less than three years, thanks in part to incredible consistency. “I’m not gonna make a video every day,” Sulek said less than two minutes into his first upload on January 19, 2023—a leg day, by the way—but he also said, “I don’t mess with the rest day.” And he’s rarely rested on YouTube since: It took him only 1,040 days (weekends included) to reach 1,000 videos, a milestone he hit on Monday.
A handful of those videos have been devoted to the scourge of skipping leg day. Four days after the “DO NOT WATCH IF YOU SKIP LEGS” video, there was “The Bulk Day 40—Legs—Be the 1% and Hit Legs,” in which a disappointed Sulek said, “I don’t want it to be like this. I don’t want every leg day … [to be] like, ‘Why are you skipping legs, still?’ Ideally, [I] would live in a world where legs get just as much hype as chest and arms and shoulders and even back. But that’s kinda just the way it goes. That’s the way of the world when it comes to legs.”
And who could forget “The Bulk Day 88—Legs—Leg Skippers Beware” (September 13, 2024), in which Sulek tried to role-play as a leg neglecter:
“This is tricky for me to do sometimes, because it’s so opposite of what my perception with this shit kind of is now, but I’m gonna try my best to enter the mind of the lifter who skips legs on the regular if not completely. … Somebody’s skippin’ legs, they’re unapologetic. They don’t even need to come up with an excuse. They’re just gonna say, ‘Eh, I felt like chest, bro, come on. Dude, come on, bro, quit doggin’ on me. You know it’s arm day. Dude, I got back today. All my buddies are doin’ back. What, am I supposed to do legs? Come on.’ … A real-ass lifter, through and through, he’s gonna hit legs.”
This past June 24, in “Offseason Day 104—The Most Skipped Lift,” Sulek lamented that lifters who “don’t care about things below the waist” are “a force that is gaining traction and momentum, which is actually kinda freakin’ wild. I mean, I’m seeing videos, full-on thousands of, like. TikTok rants … and it’s ‘Dude, you know what? Hitting legs is overrated, bro. You’re wearing pants most of the time, it takes a ton of energy to recover from.’ … If you get fooled into skipping legs and you become one of those guys, that’s on you.”
The irony of Sulek’s leg-day advocacy is that his channel provides some of the best evidence we have of how rampant the behavior he bemoans has become. Much like the spectacle of BodyBuilding.com denizens debating the number of days in a week, the concept of male lifters skipping leg day has been an internet punch line since the 2000s, but it’s difficult to determine how widespread the practice is. Inadvertently, though, Sulek has supplied some hard data.
Most of the plainspoken Sulek’s videos stick to the same template. He drives to the gym, mid-monologue. He works out and poses down. Then he drives home. There’s a charmingly lo-fi, old-school aesthetic to his output: A mic on his hat and a camera on a tripod are the only tools of his trade. There’s no nifty editing, just words and workouts. Sulek’s physique is, as he often describes it, “freaky”: Although he rarely addresses steroid use explicitly, he doesn’t claim to be “natty” and sometimes obliquely refers to being on gear. But his mien is more relatable than his unattainable body: Aside from his swearing and his grunting as he intensely tosses cartoonishly large dumbbells and lifts full stacks, he’s an easygoing guy. He has a knack for extemporaneous, conversational speaking, and he makes viewers feel like they’re accompanying him on his bodybuilding journey—or that he’s accompanying and encouraging them on theirs. He’s calming, comforting company, and inspiring to some.
You can watch Sulek’s daily uploads the second they drop—they average a TV episode–length 34 minutes, making them an ideal way to wind down—or drift away for a while without missing much. One week blends into the next; weekdays and weekends are distinctions without a difference, as far as Sulek’s upload schedule is concerned. He’s the Energizer uploader.
The only obvious way to track the passage of time via these videos is to monitor the fluctuations in Sulek’s size and definition as he bulks and cuts. And because there’s so little variation among most of his videos, his channel represents a natural experiment of sorts, conducted under quasi-controlled conditions: The format stays the same from video to video, but the muscle group in the spotlight changes. Thus, we should be able to quantify Sulek’s audience’s affinity for each kind of workout by breaking down the popularity of his videos by body part. If fewer people tend to watch his leg-related videos, it will confirm that dudes do skip leg day—even if they aren’t the ones working out.
Is this scientific? Not exactly. But it’s bro scientific, at least. And by “dude” and “bro,” I do mean “dude” and “bro”: In September, Sulek disclosed that only 4 percent of his viewers are women, noting, “It’s not unreasonable because I’m talking about working out as a guy, from a guy’s perspective. … I’m not the guy to watch for glute training.”[1]
Conveniently for us, Sulek usually sticks to simple titles that identify the featured body part. To clean up our dataset, I removed anything that wasn’t a regular lift, including videos focused on cardio, Q&As, meal or contest prep, and so on. I also excluded videos in which Sulek worked multiple muscle groups, which would have made it difficult to isolate the impact of any specific part. All told, I filtered out about 18.5 percent of his videos, leaving us with a sample of more than 800. There are still a few factors other than workout type that could affect our findings—occasional collaborations with other bodybuilding notables, minor variations in titles and descriptions, thumbnail quality—but body part should be the big one.[2]
Here's the high-level takeaway: Rounded to the nearest hundred, Sulek’s leg videos have averaged 237,100 views and 10,100 likes. His non-leg videos have averaged 307,000 views and 13,200 likes. Overall, his leg videos are roughly 30 percent less popular than the rest, suggesting that about three of every 10 viewers of his upper-body workouts skip viewing his lower-body workouts. Not only do dudes not like doing leg day, but they also don’t like watching leg day. And this is on a channel whose star vocally condemns the idea of dissing leg day! The leg neglect is real, even when no exertion greater than a screen tap or mouse click is required.
With a little more, well, legwork, we can get more granular. First, let’s look at Sulek’s workout distribution, again excluding combo days on which he worked more than one body part.
This fairly even mixture of chest, arm, back, and leg days—with a smattering of shoulders and abs—matches Sulek’s description of his own routine: It’s essentially a “bro split,” in which each day is devoted to one muscle group, except that Sulek takes fewer days off than most bros. (Sulek also barely does shoulder days because he doesn’t want his boulder shoulders to overpower the rest of his physique; for what it’s worth, overdeveloped shoulders and traps are often cited as a symptom of steroid use.)
If we break out average views and likes by body part—this time drilling down to individual leg muscles, in cases where Sulek specified leg-day subtypes in his titles—we discover that his worst-performing workouts were calf, hamstring, and quad days, followed by general leg workouts and then by everything else. Shoulders, arms, and chest are the major draws, almost doubling the measly leg-video counts even though everything but the body parts is essentially the same.
The stats don't lie about leg day. Sadly, Sulek is right about the virtues of training legs, and not just because of the potential to be top-heavy if you don’t. It’s a classic “no pain, no gain” conundrum. “It’s not like I don’t understand it,” Sulek conceded this June. “Training legs is fucking hard.”
Of course, to spur hypertrophy, every lift should be somewhat strenuous—any muscle can be trained to failure—but a heavy leg lift is especially draining and tough on the joints. And the rewards may not be as immediately obvious. For one thing, studies suggest that “upper body muscles may have more androgen receptors than lower body muscles,” which can contribute to disproportionate development of upper-body musculature in men, who have higher levels of circulating testosterone than women. In other words, men’s upper-body muscles may respond to training more quickly and obviously than their legs. Flexing is fun, and progress is self-reinforcing, so it’s no wonder that many men might be inclined to chase the gains where they most readily appear.
The so-called glamour muscles of the upper body are easier to show off than a lot of leg muscles. Perhaps relatedly, they also tend to be cited more often as attractive by women, a source of motivation for some men. (“Curls for the girls,” as the saying goes.) Well-developed arm, chest, and shoulder muscles are often obvious even under clothes, whereas one would be hard-pressed to assess, say, someone’s hamstrings when they’re wearing non-form-fitting pants. As Sulek covered last November, in a video called “Winter Shredathon Day 47—Hamstrings—Don’t Skip Muscle Groups” (which, judging by its meager view count, a lot of viewers skipped), hamstrings are so often overlooked that a lot of lifters don’t consciously skip them so much as they simply forget they exist.
Calves are the exception: Men can wear shorts to show them off. But calves are notorious for not growing without the right genes. (Alas, I speak from experience.) Many a lifter who does work legs has been slandered or libeled as a leg-day skipper because the only part of their legs that’s easily visible stays stubbornly undersized—not that I’m bitter about this or anything. Then again, some men try to be built like Johnny Bravo.[3]
And for their labors, they’re often greeted by the age-old refrain that lurks in the comments beneath that Johnny Bravo video.
In the words of Sulek, “You can lead a lifter to the squat rack, but you can’t make him squat.” Sulek didn’t respond to a request for comment about the apparent reality that many of his viewers don’t know squat about squatting. In light of his past statements about skipping leg day, however, we can speculate about how he might feel about the curlbros seemingly lurking among his spectators. “Dudes who skip leg day, they’re a virus. Wear a fuckin’ mask around them because they’ll infect you,” he said last year, adding, “I can’t even wrap my head around it, you know? … You’re skippin’ leg day because you’re fuckin’ lazy. And I hope to a fucking higher power that I’m not talking to you. Yeah, you.” (Sulek said that on a leg day, so he wasn’t talking to whichever allergic-to-leg-day subscribers skipped that video.)
Earlier this year, Sulek addressed a hypothetical lifter who’d been derelict in his leg-day duties. “I know some of you guys are out there, too,” he said. “Because jokes are not just originated out of nowhere for no fuckin’ reason. The reason people joke about that is that it’s fuckin’ true. … If you tell me that you skipped your leg day, or you tell me some shit like, ‘Oh, today was supposed to be leg day, but,’ I mean, unless you got a good reason, I’m just gonna listen to that and say, ‘Yikes.’” If that describes you, know that you’re making Sam Sulek sad.
Coincidentally or not, the first leg-day video that Sulek posted after I contacted him—and the last before his channel passed the millenary mark—bore a nonspecific title: “Cutzilla Day 93—Late Lift.” Maybe the best way to stop people from skipping leg day is to stop them from seeing leg day coming. At press time, though, the view count of “Late Lift” trailed those of two videos Sulek posted days later. I probably don’t have to tell you which body parts those featured, but I will anyway.
Chest and arms.
Thanks to Jessie Barbour and Matthew Wright for research assistance.
