Taking Walking Lunges To Another Level!

Can’t believe it was already 7 years ago when I wrote the article “Death of Walking Lunges”. Looking back, the title wasn’t probably accurate. That is because I am not against walking lunges, but rather wanted to open people’s minds to a MUCH bigger world that walking lunges actually was showing us.

The majority of people use walking lunges just because that is what you do right?! Most people don’t think of walking lunges as an advanced movement because it is so familiar to what we see in the gym. When you look a bit deeper you see why a lot of beginners especially struggle with walking lunges. Lunging forward requires us to decelerate our own body and whatever weight we are holding to a higher level AND in an unstable environment because our base of support is small. This is important because we not only need to be strong moving forward, but also RESISTING forces that are trying to move our body laterally.

You can quickly see that this is A LOT more to an exercise that often gets thrown into workouts rather randomly. However, this post isn’t dedicated to how we progress walking lunges. Rather, once we understand how much MORE is going to a drill as we know in walking lunges, when we take the same concept and apply it to other patterns we start to see there is so much more we can achieve.

What DVRT drills that we will show bring in is a heavy influence of locomotion. Why does that matter other than walking and running is largely what makes un uniquely human? As I already mentioned, we have a much larger need to build deceleration strength which has huge transfer to injury resilience and we start to have to navigate all three planes of motion. Often that is reflected in moving one plane while resisting other planes of motion.

When we apply these concepts to other movement patterns like squats, hip hinges, and yes, lunges, we have a much bigger world of training we can not just use to give us variety, but advanced the concepts of our strength training. In upcoming articles I will break down how we can progress to more advanced training like using these walking lunges in concept to a much larger world of functional fitness. Robin Paget does a great job not only brining these ideas into more movement patterns, but maintaining great form which is always so important to using more sophisticated strength training!

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