Depending on your goals and current strength, ankle weights can be a great addition to supercharge your workouts. They are a simple and cheap tool to add to your training kit to improve your strength and power.
What exercises can you use ankle weights for?
- Hanging leg/knee raises
- Lying leg raises
- Dragon flags
- L-sits
- Rear kicks (donkey kicks)
- Front and back levers
- Scissors kicks
As you can see these weights are great for adding resistance to a lot of ab exercises. They are great for improving your core strength, in particular the rectus abdominus. However, you may need to add some other exercises to train the rest of your core. Check out our ab exercise ranking post for the best ab exercises, many of which can benefit from ankle weights as well.
Some people suggest wearing them all the time as you walk around in your normal life. Although it is dubious how much benefit this would actually provide to your body. Additionally they would look out of place even if you tried to hide them under some pants. I would argue it would be better to add some weight plates to a backpack and wear that like you are rucking. This will definitely improve your fitness and strength compared to wearing ankle weights.
How heavy should ankle weights be?
It depends on your current strength and your goals. You can get angle weights in many weight ranges and many of them are adjustable to your level. For a new user of ankle weights, this 11 pound set is fantastic. For those who are a bit more advanced, this 20 pound kit will allow you add a lot of resistance to the exercises we discussed in this post. We have also added these to our home gym kit, so if you need some more recommendations check it out.