Lunge Tutorial

Hey everybody, welcome back. This is your lunge tutorial. I'm going to talk about lunges in three different planes. First we'll go forward and backwards, and we'll do a couple together as well. In a perfect lunge, your legs are 90 degree angles, so if you step forward and maybe step back, your front foot is flat on the ground, your back foot is a little bit, your heel is lifted, and you're on the balls of your feet.

Okay, so if you're in this position, find this position first, and we'll do a couple together. Bring your core in, chest up high. You're just going to lower and lift your back knee. So when you lower down, we are at 90 degrees. And lift.

Exhale. Inhale, exhale, up, two, three, four, one more, five. So if nothing else, if you have trouble stepping in and out of a lunge, go to that. That should be your very base move. Let's try on the other leg going forward and backwards.

So what I mean by that is stepping into the lunge, pushing back, and standing up. We want to even out our legs, too. So let's do four more together. Step forward, push off the front, and go back. Again, forward.

When you stand up, chest is high, pull your shoulders back and down, four, good. So now, that was always stepping forward. We're in the forward plane, right? Forward and back. And that also means that you can get away with stepping backwards into a lunge as well.

So let's alternate and do four lunges of you stepping back and together. Make sure you step wide, long. So make a big space before you bring your knee down. Okay, let's get ready again. Left foot back, down, together.

Use that front leg to pull you back up. Back and forth. Okay, one more, bring it up, good. That should give you a feel of forward and backward lunges. Let's talk about this plane, lateral lunges.

I'm going to show you a couple first, sitting back, together, back, together. And what I want you to focus on is a couple different elements. One is this leg, like if we were to sit back here. This glute is really important, and this knee is also really important. Here's what it looks like from the side.

Sitting back, this knee is not past your toe, and your glute is all the way back. All of my weight is transferred onto this leg. So let's try that. Step to the side and come together, two, three. One more, step, and bring it together.

Naturally, your chest comes forward a little bit more. That's okay, as long as this doesn't happen, right? Don't let your chest completely collapse. You want your abs engaged, okay? If that's still difficult for you, here's another way to do it.

Legs wide, we're going to go to the left. You're going to push your hips to one side, and you're going to come back up. That's it. So arms even out to help you keep your chest up, keep your knee back behind that toe, and come together. Let's do three more, three, exhale as you come together, two, last one, great.

So that should give you a couple different variations of how to do a lunge on your own depending on what level you're at. I will add more as we go through the rest of the videos, but this is your basic. Don't lose that form. The last plane is what goes through the middle, right? Right through the middle.

So this plane, it's a transverse. So here's what it looks like. Curtsy lunges, or bowler's lunge, where you step and you step behind you at a 45 degree angle, that's the lunges that I'm talking about. A really good way to kind of feel what you're supposed to feel when you're in that position is if we just go down into our normal lunge and move our leg a little bit to the side towards the standing leg. Move it back.

Let's practice that together. Let's do three, because this one's pretty tough, one, back, two, don't let your weight be on your leg, hands free, three, good, stand up. You should feel the burn all the way on the side of your leg. It's a little bit different, bend forward and back lunges. Usually the burn is inside your inner thighs, forward and backwards.

When you're sideways, you should feel it more in the side of your leg. When you're in the transverse, you should feel your glutes. So that's why we mix them all up, because we're hitting different areas of the body. Let's try the other leg, just so we even it out. Go down into your lunge position, step to the side and together, two, together.

Last one, three, together, good. So now you have a good feel of the three different planes of motion. In our videos, we go through the very basic to the very advanced. A lot of times, I'll talk about lunge jumps. In the forward and back plane, there's a couple different ways you can do it.

For example, you can stay here and pulse hop, but that way you're not going back and forth, right? You're staying right where you are. This one's a great one to work on, but it's a pretty big burn. All of them are. Lunges are hard.

It's okay. We know that. Let's try that one together, three of them. Step wide, down, hop. Use your arms, two, three, and if you can't jump, just go up and down.

Now let's try the other side. We have to even it out. We got two legs, three on this side, down, hop, two, and three. Three different lunges, three different sides, all kinds of goodness. If we add cardio, it gets real tough, but it's really fun.

Two different versions of cardio and how you can add cardio when I say lunge jumps. There's one where we're going to triple jump and come down on the back leg. It goes one, two, three, down. Let's practice that one, okay? Let's try one on each side, starting with your left leg back.

That's three jumps because that way we switch legs, right? Okay, here we go, one, two, three, down, again, one, two, three, down, perfect. You can stick to that if lunge jumps, which I'm going to show you right now, are too difficult. This is the top level of what we're doing here today. If we were to do lunge jumps, knees come down, you jump up, switch your legs, and land in the lunge, okay?

Let's practice. We'll do four. Want to always be even. Ready? Here we go, one, two, three, four.

The trick is, again, the stability of being center and jumping up, switching legs when you're up in the air and landing in a lunge. It is pretty complicated, so if you're not there yet, you've got plenty of other options to go back to. If we were to go to the lateral plane, same thing, side lunge, come up, hop. We're going to add little hops in places like that, but the base of the move is the same. If we were to do it in the transverse with the curtsy lunges, it would be hop and touch, hop and touch, but the basics are always the same.

So if you ever get tired or if it's too much, go back to what you know, because that's your comfort zone, and that's how you proceed, because this is a practice. This is all about progression, and that comes with repetition. So I hope you've enjoyed the lunges tutorial. I hope you find something that you can do, and we'll see you again soon.