Previous installments of “Feel the Burn” can be found here. Most recently, we talked about posture, and getting some. Posture, we mean.
Hi gang! Missed you! We’ve been starting to film our videos so you won’t be stuck with other people’s YouTube visuals for long! In store for you: pull-up videos, buddy-comedy videos (a bunch of funny, dorky moves you can ONLY do with a friend, trust me), it’s-a-weird-time-of-day-so-you-have-the-place-to-yourself-and-can-do-weirder-things-with-the-gear videos (a personal favourite), a bunch of great, basic workouts, videos of awful things you can do to your abs, etc. And we’d love to hear what else you’d like to see in a misandrist workout video, too. Aurora (my buffness idol) and I are happy to try anything once.
Now, today, we’re talking about…
“Lunges: less unpleasant than squats.” – Paul, in his second letter to the Corinthians
Ah, lunges. As many different kinds as the stars in the sky (we’re going to talk about EIGHT different kinds.) I thought we’d talk about lunges before squats, because, as the Apostle Paul said, they are very slightly less unpleasant, and it is harder (though not impossible!) to mess them up. They are also excellent for you, and I have a bunch of advice on how to a) do them correctly, and b) keep them interesting. They are also a wonderful no-gear exercise that can LITERALLY be done anywhere, including your gate at the airport or in a line to use the ladies’ room, if you were born without a sense of shame.
Let’s start with Lunge Classic, shall we? There are so few rules.
Rule the First: Do not let your front knee extend over your toes (easiest way to do this is to focus on letting your BACK knee sink faster than you’re bending your front knee, it really works).
Rule the Second: Keep your upper body upright and straight (if you think about sitting BACK as you sink down, you’ll stay pretty straight, which is in keeping with many, many physical activies where you’re naturally inclined to lean forward.)
Rule the Third: Take a big enough step.
Rule the Fourth: Do not fall over.
Here’s a video. I picked this one because this dude is earnest as balls, and I love it.
Reverse Lunges are something I personally prefer, but you may need to work on your balance a bit first with Lunge Classic to feel comfortable stepping that leg behind you. What I like about reverse lunges is how much harder it is to push your front knee out too far, since you start with your front leg in the correct position and move everything ELSE back. This video is good, just pretend she’s not holding weight (or hold some weight, but we’ll get to that variant later!)
Walking Lunges. You are in a hallway, or any longish place. Do a Lunge Classic. As you come up out of it, step your back foot alllllll the way forward until it becomes your front foot. Lunge again. Now switch. Go until you hit an obstacle you didn’t notice because you were so fucking tranced out by doing lunges. Feel your heart begging to escape your body. Ignore it (don’t ignore it, listen to the signals of your body!), turn around, come back doing the same thing. I guess you could do reverse walking lunges, if you wanted to, but you didn’t hear it from me. (Video guy is adorable.)
Lunges While Holding Weight. You don’t really need a visual for this, just…hold some weight. You can either hold a single dumbbell (or 2 litre of Coke, whatever) in front of your body, to your chest, or a weight in each hand. Don’t let the weight pull you forward, you’ll want to concentrate harding on keeping your upper body upright as you sink down. From your upper body’s point of view, a good lunge should feel like you are slowly sinking into an abyss that has opened up beneath you that is exactly the diameter of your torso.
Okay, the next three are for when you’re feeling pretty solid with your lunges.
Jumping Lunges. Not your best bet if you’re a heavier person, or if you have joint stuff, but if you do not have those issues, and focus your attention on landing softly, like a goddamn CAT, this will both blast your quads AND send your cardio through the roof. I absolutely hate/love jumping lunges. Promise me you won’t start flinging your front knee out too far when you start to get tired, though. (Girlfriend in this video has fabulous thighs, by the way, and I like to pretend the clinical distance between the coach and the athlete masks a lot of sexual tension.)
Sliding Lunges. One of my all-time favourite pieces of gym equipment: sliding disks. This exercise is basically just walking lunges, but instead of walking, you put one foot on each sliding disk, and you just…glide forward, lunging as you go. It adds stability work, you get a nice flow going. Hold some weights while you do it, and, man, you’ve got a stew going! You can also do them without going anywhere, just standing in place and sliding your front foot forward, lunging, pulling it back, putting your other foot forward, lunging, pulling it back…
Lunges On a Wobbly Thing. Oh, these are a lot of fun! They work best with Reverse Lunges, I find. Use a Bosu ball, almost all gyms have one. Or buy one (they cost a fortune, though!) They’re dynamite, I do billions of things with them. Here’s a really good guide to this move. And, of course, you can grab weights while you do it. I also like doing this move with the Bosu flipped over, so your foot is on the flat side. The trick to making that variation really work for you? Try to keep the flat surface parallel to the ground as you do the lunge, it takes a ton of stability to keep it from tilting!
Side Lunges on Two Wobbly Things. You’ve got this. And, if you don’t, just skip the wobbly things part!
HAVE FUN, KIDS!
Tags: feel the burn, fitness, lunges
You are OUT OF YOUR MIND if you think lunges are better than squats, because lunges take TWICE AS LONG because you can only do them one leg at a time!
Mallory is correct. I am also way more likely to fall over while doing lunges.
But it takes a long time to be able to do squats without your knees flaring out and while keeping the correct amount of weight on your heels and while keeping your chest open!
AGREED. I can do squats just fine, but there’s something about the lunges we have to do in my BodyPump class that make me…not in pain, really, but they make me feel really dizzy while I’m doing them? Like, a few weeks ago I found myself wondering if I was actually going to get so dizzy I’d pass out. Only happens with lunges, and nothing else!
ALSO THEY HURT MORE NEXT DAY
Mallory, I think you would enjoy lunges more if (as in the lead picture) you were lunging in to stab someone in the FACE (those are epeeists, for whom face-stabbing is not only permitted, but RECOMMENDED).
Yes, and also yes.
Squats > lunges 5ever.
Yeah, squats win, mostly because the grinding noises in my knees aren’t as loud during squats. When I lunge, I prefer backward lunges (I actually feel more stability) or jump lunges, because they go faster and I can’t hear the sickening sound of my knees over my breathing. Sad, right?
What if lunges make one knee feel tight and funny and not in pain exactly but definitely not *right* ? What if I do lunges only on the side that does not feel like that? Will my thighs be comically different sizes? What about my butt?
I FINALLY got to the point where my squats have my knees in the right spot. Hoorraaaay.
As an ex-fencer, I can tell you if you do enough lunges on just one side your thighs will not really be comically different sizes but they will definitely be comically different shapes. I mean, fencing lunges are a totally different thing, but whatever. Your butt will be great.
Holla! Epeeist here. My front leg is a bit bigger than my back leg, but I’m pretty sure both legs/ass sides are mostly the same shape. YMMV. And yes, fencing is awesome for your ass. Really terrible for finding pants, though.
As for your knee, there are so many terrible things you can do to your knees with these motions! Though you should generally be fine if you’re doing the low-impact stuff above carefully and not bending your knee too far. If the weird knee is your dominant one, make sure you’re not bending your leg too far inwards or outwards, which often happens if certain muscle groups are weak. If it’s the other, make sure it’s not moving in weird ways when you recover and take it slow.
i also want to know this!
Somehow these posts always pop up on days when I’d planned to go to the gym but then decided I just plain didn’t want to and started looking for a justification to skip it but then I’m told to Feel the Burn and now I feel guilty so ok, I guess I’ll go to the gym later.
I will now do lunges behind the circ desk in between patrons. Thanks, Nicole!
Ditto on the thanks for this. After a previous Feel The Burn post, I started doing lunges correctly for the first time EVER.
I LIKE SQUATS BETTER
I go to a workout class and the trainers there say it’s ok to extend your knee beyond your ankle if you’re doing split squats/lunges (we do these on a step). Thoughts??
Ankle is just fine! It’s the toes. And I don’t even think it’s believed to be terrible for you anymore, it just makes the move less useful for your back leg and makes it easier to get your torso too far forward.
Thought: Bulgarian split squats. How the Soviets captured Sofia. None of the Bulgarians could lift their ruddy legs after repeated Bulgarian split squats.
This is making me want to get back into fencing, but it is one of those sports that only children and Olympians do and I am not an Olympian :/
I think there’s a typo here. Clearly you meant “it is one of those sports that only AWESOME PEOPLE do and I am super-awesome.” Right?
Well, clearly 😉 But it’s hard to find other awesome grown-up people to fence with, which is why I haven’t fenced in years. There’s a lot of sports/general extracurriculars that kids are encouraged to do, that no one expects you to keep up with into adulthood if you aren’t absurdly, ridiculously good at it and earn money and fame from it.
I think that says something sad/interesting about our whole society: adults don’t play, unless the play is actually work. So when you become an adult, exercise should be done dutifully, ritualistically, possibly with pleasure but not with the same sense of pointless, unproblematic fun. It’s work (acceptable), not play (unacceptable).
So many thoughts and feels about this truth.
(Follow-up: in the unlikely event that any of you are fencers living in LA, could we make a Toasty fencing club? I would teach you fencing but I only have one mask and you kind of need to wear a mask.)
Ooooh I went fencing once and was super fun (I am not in LA though). There is a fencing cub where I live that has a pretty big range of competitiveness where adults totally go for mainly recreational/fun purposes, maybe there is a sneaky one in LA?
What are some good tips for getting your body strong enough to do these exercises. The last time I worked out (7 years ago) I ripped my stomach muscles while doing an arm exercise because my arms weren’t strong enough and I was compensating with my abs. It hurt more than getting my IUD installed so I’m a little scared of repeating it.
I bought some baby weights (not the official name, but they are 2 lbs and come in pastel colors, so) to practice with my arms before attempting pushups or pullups but Im not sure what to do with my legs to make them strong enough fpr lunges. Would yoga work? Or lying on the floor and lifting them up and down?
I think yoga’s great for people who plan to train independently, but are worried about injuring themselves (through ignorance/accident, or because they don’t have good supportive muscles). Beyond general strength/flexibility, it’s really helped with my whole-body awareness (WOW that sounded lame) when I’m doing other, more targeted exercises (keeping a neutral pelvis during lunges, spinning up my inseams to keep pressure off my lower back in plank).
That’s good to know! The body awareness is big for me, since I’m not used to working out I worry I wont be aware of how I should be positioning myself during workout moves
I have found yoga super helpful for increased body awareness and learning what my body limits are
In general, when you’re weight training you always, always need to work your core, and frequently, abs and lower back both. Luckily they’ve been bearing weight your whole life so they can take a lot. BUT since you’ve got an old injury, talk to a doctor first before you get into it.
What I do is between workout days, I take 10 minutes and do a circuit of body weight core exercises – planking, those weird half-situps (keep yr lower back on the ground and bring your clasped hands from above your head down as far as you can toward yr knees, like you’re swinging a battleaxe or something, just getting your shoulders and upper back slightly off the ground), leg lifts, super(wo)mans, plank jacks, sitting twists. Lay down as though to do situps and instead bend to the side to touch your feet. Do each as much as you can for 30 seconds and go straight to the next exercise. Your upper abs will feel tight by the end but do that routine enough and it will bring your overall ability to lift up, and protect you from bad injuries. Again, abs are tough, so most people should be able to do this routine 2-3 times a week.
If you just want to work your biceps, you can isolate the muscle by sitting and bracing your elbow on the inside of your thigh while you curl.
Eek! That sounds awful!
I did some running training a few months ago and found that I basically wasn’t using my glutes and was overcompensating with calf muscles. The exercises the trainer started me with to strengthen the glutes were bridges and clams. It definitely made a difference and I can now feel the glutes when I walk up stairs and similar, where I could barely even recognise if I was activating them at the start.
I love lunges! I do them all the time but in a yoga context (Warrior poses, bound side angle pose). I find them Very Empowering and Badass. My quads are really, really strong now and I feel pretty good about it.
Does anyone know why lunges hurt more than squats? My knees object to lunges so very strenuously, but squats give me no trouble and I do not understand the difference …
For me, both squats and lunges hurt my knees unless they are lined up just exactly right, and I find it slightly easier to get the lining up right for squats. Possibly because I can adjust my foot position without falling over.
YKMV, of course. (Your knees may vary.)
Lunges are the most efficient way to give myself hypoglycemia though. I carry like 90% of my body’s muscle in my quads, so I do lunges and my body’s like, “OH SHIT we’re gonna need backup, burn ALL THE SUGAR YOU’VE GOT!”
The only workout-related injury I ever received was from a weighted lunge. Just tore up the cartilage in my right knee. Don’t fuck with cartilage y’all, that shit never stops hurting.
The only workout-related injury I ever received was from a weighted lunge. Just tore up the cartilage in my right knee. Don't fuck with cartilage y'all, that shit never stops hurting.
In general, when you're weight training you always, always need to work your core, and frequently, abs and lower back both. Luckily they've been bearing weight your whole life so they can take a lot. BUT since you've got an old injury, talk to a doctor first before you get into it.
What I do is between workout days, I take 10 minutes and do a circuit of body weight core exercises – planking, those weird half-situps (keep yr lower back on the ground and bring your clasped hands from above your head down as far as you can toward yr knees, like you're swinging a battleaxe or something, just getting your shoulders and upper back slightly off the ground), leg lifts, super(wo)mans, plank jacks, sitting twists. Lay down as though to do situps and instead bend to the side to touch your feet. Do each as much as you can for 30 seconds and go straight to the next exercise. Your upper abs will feel tight by the end but do that routine enough and it will bring your overall ability to lift up, and protect you from bad injuries. Again, abs are tough, so most people should be able to do this routine 2-3 times a week.
If you just want to work your biceps, you can isolate the muscle by sitting and bracing your elbow on the inside of your thigh while you curl.
Just added lunges to my new workout routine Wednesday. I feel so ahead of the curve! Still working on Rule No 4 though…
Yessss, I was just wondering what had happened to Feel the Burn (because I have a very poor sense of the passage of time, I guess). It has been very cold and gross in the New England part of the world lately, obviously far too cold to go all the way to the gym, so I’ve been doing weird smashed-together versions of the first two workouts (basically just leaping around in my living room, it’s the best). Very excited about even more horrible things to do to my legs. QUADS 4EVA.
What (if anything) do you recommend as a lunge alternative for people with shit knees? I’ve had some bad falls/car crashes and lunges/squats/excessive stairs make my knees hurt. One feels kind of grind-y.