This leg workout will focus on developing the teardrop muscle just above the knee

I was always impressed when I saw a bodybuilder in shorts who not only had great size to his legs, but each muscle group clearly defined – especially the tear-dropped shaped muscle on the upper inside of the knee.

My legs had always been lean and strong from when I was an avid mountain biker fan (before I started weight lifting), but was lacking the sort of thickness and detail that I wanted after I began to workout. Growing the upper legs have the sort of competition-winning package that I was seeing many of the pros had on stage, would take many years to develop. However, even within my first year of training, I discovered that I could transform the appearance of my legs – especially when seen in shorts, but developing the Vastus Medialis muscle: used to extend the leg at the knee and to stabilize the patella (kneecap).

Foot Positioning & Angles

Just like with most exercises and muscle groups: there’s the standard way of performing it, and then there’s a modified way of performing it. I find that to really hit the Vastus Medialis (in which I’ll refer to as the tear drop muscle from now on, given it’s shape when fully flexed), I have to change up a standard exercise by positioning my feet, or the angle of my feet slightly differently.

This doesn’t even have to be by a big amount, and a big part of this also comes from your mindset and ability to consciously focus on a specific muscle when being trained, so that it can be fully contracted at the peak of each rep.

Make Use of Iso-lateral Movements

We’re so used to doing everything with both sides of our body (especially legs), like walking and climbing stairs, that we tend to do that same thing in the gym. There are many exercises that can be very beneficial to conditioning and even developing the muscles in the leg – especially the tear drop one. You’ll find within the program below that there are two exercises that focus on single-leg movements: both a press movement and and extension-type movement.

If these are new to you – practice them. Familiarize yourself with them, and make them part of your routine. Not only will this help with other areas of your training, such as balance, coordination, and greater symmetry, but it will help you feel more the individual muscle, rather than using both legs to perform a movement, where the more-dominant side will often carry the weaker one.

It’s Not Always About The Weight

I consider this type of training to be more detailed work than basic mass. The first is where you tend to focus on a specific region of a muscle (the tear drop in this case), and the latter is generally adopted when you want to putt on size all over. The training methodology isn’t too different for both, except that when your attention is one particular region of a muscle, you will not have the same strength as when using all the muscles together in a more straight-forward approach to lifting.

I’ve found if you want to focus on a specific muscle, it’s better to feel it being optimally worked. This for me, usually means modifying an exercise – such as a leg extension performed one leg at a time, with the entire leg slightly rotated outwards, and the main focus on the upper 2/3rd of the movement, and using a weight thats lighter compared to when performing it with both legs (that’s obvious, but I still mean I’m not trying to lift the heaviest weight I can for the desired repetitions).

You’ve probably found at times that when you try to lift too heavy, you lose the pump in the muscle and will put everything into just moving the weight and not necessarily feeling the muscle get thoroughly worked. If that’s the case, start with a much lighter weight, and build up to find the right balance of weight used, and feeling in the muscle being trained.