How to do lunges right
From time to time during your exercise routine your instructor in the exercise video or the aerobics class may ask you to do lunges. But what are lunges and what muscle group do they target? How can you do them more effectively without hurting yourself?
Mark McDonald, trainer at Gymkhana, shares below ways to get the most for your body when you do lunges.
1. The lunge is a compound exercise. What this means is that movement happens around several joints and involves large muscle groups. In the case of the lunge, the hips, knees and ankles are the primary joints involved. The glutes, quadriceps, hamstrings and calves are the primary muscle groups used to perform the exercise.
2. The lunge is a unilateral movement exercise, meaning only one side is worked on at a time. This minimises any help a stronger limb would give to weaker one, like what happens when doing bilateral movements such as the leg press or squat.
3. There is no one way to do a lunge. Some have sports-specific applications, while some merely enhance functionality. For the purpose of this piece, only the walking lunge and the reverse lunge will be discussed.
The walking lunge entails taking a big step forward and lowering the torso into a lunge position by bending the knee of the leg placed in front to 90 degrees, while allowing the knee of the trailing leg to lower to the point of almost touching the ground. You then pull your body up, forward pressing through the heel of the foot planted in front, and carrying through by bringing the other leg up and repeating the process.
The reverse lunge is performed by stepping backward into the lunge position and pulling back up to a standing position by pressing through the heel of the foot in front. The process is repeated with the other leg.
4. The exercise can be performed using only body weight initially. It can be progressed by holding dumbbells or placing a bar with weights across the shoulders to increase the resistance.
5. The lunge strengthens and helps develop the quadriceps, hamstrings and glutes, but also stresses other muscles, some of which act as stabilisers. Some of these are, but are not limited to, the spinal erectors abdominal muscle, hip flexors, as well as the tibialis anterior muscle.
