by Josh Henkin
One is for serious strength.
The other is just for stability.
One is for packing on muscle.
The other is to do this “functional” stuff that we are told to do but really don’t understand what it means.
One is for increased performance in just about everything.
The other goes for those that really don’t want to train hard.
What are these two contrasting things? I am comparing how most people in fitness see squats and lunges. The squat has long been held up as “the king” of lower body exercises while the lunge has often been seen as the token exercise that you do because it is suppose to be good for you. However, you would never dream of emphasizing the lunge over the squat, or would you?
For quite some time I had the above belief, especially during my days competing in Strongman. Real strength was reserved for squats, deadlifts, cleans and such. Why waste precious energy on an exercise that many coaches think is a far secondary exercise or even less!
Something interesting began to happen though. As I kept going heavier in my training my body started feeling it. Stiffness, tightness, and little increase in my performance made me begin to wonder if there was a better way to really get strong and fit.
It wasn't just casual aches and pains, I began to see my recovery take much longer, I saw my training being based around what didn ’t hurt that day. How in the world could I go against the gospel of strength training though?
Really only one reason would be good enough to go against such established beliefs, I felt and performed better when I made lunges more of a core lift in my programs! Why? Why in the world would I have started seeing better results from implementing lunges not as an accessory exercise, but a focused lift?
I began to wonder why, after all I can theorize things such as better hip stability, building more mobility, fixing imbalances, hmmm, might be something here
While I am from the first person to think lunges are worthwhile, is there anything more than my anecdotal evidence though? Is this just some silly controversy I am trying to begin?
A 1999 study by scientists at the University of Wisconsin, La Crosse, set out to find different levels of muscle activation by some common lower body exercises. In this study, both squats and lunges were included. The results?
The researchers studied glute max, glute medius, and hamstrings. All three are important in hip stability and power production. According to the EMG activity of 12 trained individuals there were three interesting findings;
"For the gluteus maximus, squats elicited significantly more muscle activation than both the horizontal and vertical leg presses, but showed no significant differences in EMG activity when compared to the other exercises." (yes including lunges)
"Results for the gluteus medius showed that quadruped hip extensions, step- ups and lunges generated significantly more muscle activation than squats."
"Finally, for the hamstrings quadruped hip extensions, step-ups, lunges and four-way hip extensions garnered significantly more EMG activity than squats…"
Hmm, isolated study? How about a study where researchers from the University of Arkansas and Eastern Kentucky University looked at muscle activity of squats compared to lunges. The study looked at female college athletes and found, “ that there was no greater muscle activation when performing any of the squat depths to that of the body weight lunge. It was revealed that the body weight lunge did indeed produce more activation in the majority of all muscles analyzed when compared to the three squat depths.”
Why mention the body weight lunge? The real shock here is that the lunge was compared to a weighted squat! That says a lot about the power lunges do possess.
Don ’t worry though, all this lunge talk doesn ’t mean that I don ’t believe in the squat. I just want to open your eyes to the often overlooked lunge and maybe have all of us re-evaluate how we implement this great drill.
More Than One Plane
The lunge represents a less stable body position, this level of instability actually causes a lot of often underutilized muscles to turn on. Turning on these smaller muscles (stabilizers) helps build strength in a more indirect route. By improving the whole body stability of the body we develop a stronger foundation in which to develop force and strength. As goes the old saying, “you are only as strong as your weakest link!”
The less stable body positions also represent a highly underutilized form of training, multi-planar. Basically, multi-planar training is when we move in one plane of motion (there are three in natural human movement) and resist motion in other planes.
Even something as simple as walking actually has us moving in all three planes at once, however, we rarely train this in the gym. Remember, we want to connect our strength training to our every day living as much as possible.
What does multi-planar training look like? When we step forward in a lunge we actually are also resisting forces that are pushing us to the side and trying to make us rotate. We can use kettlebells to actually enhance this effect.
Multi-planar training increases stability, makes our nervous system smarter, and yes, can be awesome for improving conditioning. This is something we don ’t really get the opportunity to train in our more stable lifts such as squats and deadlifts.
More Than Up And Down
Think of your favorite athlete, look how we do most things in life, rarely in either case do we see movements that are strictly up and down patterns. We are reaching, twisting, moving in all sorts of positions often at once. This is something we can really use the lunge to help improve.
One of the more overlooked benefits of lunging is the fact we don ’t just get force when we move up and down, but by lunging in different directions we get some really unique forces acting upon the body. A big reason that knowing the right direction to progress your lunges is important is because we can greatly increase the intensity of a lunge just by changing direction.
For example, when we lunge forward, more of our body must be decelerated as we step forward than when we step backwards. Drop lunging (lunging backwards) keeps our most of our center of mass over our base of support. Huh? Forward lunging is harder than backward lunging because we have more of our body to stop as we step in that direction. This is something we see very often in sport and every day life.
Consider all the various directions we can step when we lunge and you have a wide array of ways to progress and challenge the lunge beyond just the weights you use!
The Modern Lunge
The material we have already provided should be a lot to work with with clients in establishing good movement in the lunge. As we advance the lunge as a movement pattern we want to start to amplify the multi-planar potential of the lunge.
Doing so not only allows us to build higher levels of strength, but stability as well. Being able to accomplish both also results in using more muscles and placing a higher demand metabolically upon the body. In other words, we can build strength and stability while we are also improving lean body mass and conditioning. That definitely makes for more efficient exercises in our programs.
One of the greatest benefits of using the Ultimate Sandbag is the fact we can manipulate the body in many different ways. A very simple example that isn’t easy, is a movement like our Shoulder Up Down that increases the frontal plane demands.
Eventually though, we progress to movements that you may be familiar with like our MAX lunges. People may still remember we use to call them “rotational lunges”, but that was referring to the movement of the Ultimate Sandbag, not the body.
The MAX (multiple axis) better refers to what is actually occurring with the body. Such movements are actually strong anti-rotational movements that do take us through all 3 planes of motion (resisting the frontal and transverse plane while moving through the sagittal plane). Rotational lunges made people think that the goal was to rotate as much as possible which is NOT the point of the exercise.
MAX Lunge Series
As physical therapist, Jessica Bento, breaks down some of our MAX lunge progressions, you start to see the lunge pattern offers us A LOT in terms of overall functional fitness. Whether that is muscle activation, stability, power, and functional strength. Due to the complexity and the high nervous system requirement it makes sense that lunges probably SHOULD be done before squats. This may sound like heresy, but I hope you have a whole new perspective on why we should be challenging our view of the lunge.
References:
Dwelly, P., Oliver, G. Blair, H., Keeley, D. Hoffman, H, “Improved Muscle Activation in Performing A Body Weight Lunge Compared to the Traditional Back Squat,” University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, AR, USA Eastern Kentucky University, Richmond, KY, USA
Josh Henkin
Josh is an international presenter and strength coach who has taught in over 13 countries worldwide and consulted with some of the top fitness and performance programs in the world. You can check out his DVRT online fitness educational certifications/courses HERE and get 20% off with code “pb20”