Hello Warriors! It has been a bit since I have done a Top 5 Tips for strength training. Honestly, between all three of us needing to prep for school, and in person school at that, and dealing with mental health issues the late summer and early fall sort of got away from me. So, let’s remedy that right now! Here are my top 5 tips to help you perfect lunges.
Lunges are an exercise I both love and hate. I hate them because without a doubt lunges are one of those exercises that I am going to feel the next day. OK, the next four days if I am being completely honest. And I won’t feel them just a little bit. I’m talking difficulty walking up the stairs and sitting down to pee. #iykyk
But I love to keep these in my routine. Why? Lots of reasons. Lunging is one of the foundational motions. It is something we do or need to do quite a bit. It is a unilateral motion, meaning that one leg is in motion at a time (or in the case of advanced versions like walking lunges, each leg is doing something different). This is critical to developing balance, stability in the lower body and core, and keeping our walking and running games strong.
Lunges hit all of the large muscle groups in the lower body. Quads, hamstrings, glutes. Check, check, and check. In addition, lunges are great for training core stability and they utilize a lot of the smaller lower body muscles (like the gastrocnemius and soleus in the calf) for balance. As always, though, this is only the case if you are performing this exercise properly.
So, my first tip with lunges is to properly engage your core. It isn’t widely appreciated that walking, running, and lunging involve rotation. Because the legs are moving separately, this creates rotational forces in the body. You need to counteract those forces in order to maintain balance. So stand up nice and tall. Stack your shoulders over your hips and pull your belly button in towards your spine. If you need more info, check out my Straight Up Cues.
Now that you are ready to move, you are ready for my second tip. Take a big step. Bigger than you think you need to. A lot of the hip, knee, or ankle pain that is associated with performing lunges has to do with the size step you are taking. When you take a smaller step, your body has a smaller base of support to move over. And even though the lunge motion appears mostly vertical, a large horizontal displacement of limbs must occur. Bigger step means bigger area to work with and less pain from joints that are squished.
Third tip, as with squats, your individual pain free range of motion is important. Traditional wisdom holds that you want your thigh parallel to the floor. If you can get lower without pain, then you’ll stand to gain more benefit from the deeper range of motion. And to answer your next question, no, you don’t need to be overly concerned if your knees move past your toes. Again, as long as there isn’t joint pain.
On the flip side, if you aren’t able to get to parallel without pain, that’s okay. There is nothing wrong with working within your body’s capabilities until you gain a bit more strength. Take the lunge as low as you comfortably can.
OK, so now that we are down, it’s time to push back to start. Here is where I see a lot of mistakes. Usually mistakes and form breaks have to do with people trying to harness momentum. Leaning or swinging the torso and/or upper body forward. Adding a little bounce. Pressing the hands into the forward thigh. Resist the urge to do any of these things. If you find it tough to press back up, take a shallower lunge and work on strength first. Split squats are also a fantastic mod to out train this tendency.
And lastly, a little something that I tend to remind my yoga students of all the time. Different sides of our body have different abilities. Especially if you are dealing with a chronic condition (i.e. arthritis or fibromyalgia) or have sustained an injury to one side (i.e. ACL tears, sprained ankle), you may notice differences in strength, stability, or flexibility.
The tendency is to try and force the weaker/less stable/less flexible side into the same posture and angles as the stronger side. Please don’t. Treat each side of your body differently if needed. You don’t want to injure yourself because you tried to force your body into a posture it wasn’t ready for. Additionally, treating the weaker side with what it needs will help it strengthen faster.
So, until next time, happy lunging and be well friends!
