Lateral Lunge (Frontal Plane)

Lateral Lunge (Frontal Plane) is an exercise that targets the muscles in the lower body while also improving balance, coordination and agility. This exercise primarily works the hip flexors and quadriceps, with secondary muscle activation in the glutes and hamstrings. By stepping the feet apart and turning the toes outwards, the lateral lunge variation increases the challenge of the exercise and develops strength and stability in the adductors. Lateral Lunge (Frontal Plane) is

Transcript

00:00:0200:00:07
This is Brent, President of B2C Fitness,
00:00:0200:00:07
and we're talking about our lower body
00:00:0700:00:11
resistance training progressions. In this video we're going to take our sagittal
00:00:1100:00:15
plane lunge, and progress it to a frontal or lateral lunge. I'm going to have my
00:00:1500:00:19
friend Laura come out and help me demonstrate this exercise. Now, the way we
00:00:1900:00:24
start this exercise is just kind of get into a sumo stance. So we're going to
00:00:2400:00:28
have a nice wide stance, we're going to start with our static lunge variation.
00:00:2800:00:34
I'm going to have Laura go ahead and sit back behind one of her legs keeping
00:00:3400:00:38
the other leg nice and straight. Now from here all we need to know is our kinetic
00:00:3800:00:43
chain checkpoints to make sure our form is straight. On this side it should look
00:00:4300:00:50
like a squat. Our foot, ankle, knee, and hip should all be in nice alignment. You can
00:00:5000:00:54
see here that Laura has nice alignment on this side, so we've got a nice width to
00:00:5400:01:00
her feet. Let's go ahead and do the other side Laura. Now, the primary muscles
00:01:0000:01:04
working in a frontal plane lunge should be the glute max and glute medius. She
00:01:0400:01:10
should be pushing through this side, trying to drive her back up and center.
00:01:1000:01:16
So let's go ahead and see that, Laura. Good, and back the other way. Perfect. She's
00:01:1600:01:20
nice and drawn-in, her upper body mechanics are fine. I'm going to show you a
00:01:2000:01:25
frontal plane view, or a lateral view.
00:01:2700:01:35
Let's see you go ahead with a little wider stance, good, and sit over this leg, good. What you
00:01:3500:01:40
should notice is from this view, same thing, it's just a squat. So we're
00:01:4000:01:44
looking at tibia torso angle. And our tibia torso angle is pretty good. She's got a
00:01:4400:01:48
little bit of an excessive forward lean thanks to some lower leg dysfunction
00:01:4800:01:52
that we've been working on, but you, like I said, should notice that we're
00:01:5200:01:55
just looking at squat form. Now let's go ahead and see you
00:01:5500:02:03
squat to the other side, and nice form once again. Go ahead and turn back around.
00:02:0300:02:07
Alright, if I want to progress this exercise there's a lot of ways to do
00:02:0700:02:12
this. If I just wanted to increase strength maybe I would add resistance so
00:02:1200:02:17
we're staying in that 8 to 12 rep range, or 6 to 12 rep range,
00:02:1700:02:23
giving her a little weight to make sure she hits voluntary fatigue within that
00:02:2300:02:29
rep range. Good. Let's go ahead sit over one way, notice how the dumbbells kind of
00:02:2900:02:31
go over each side of the knee. That tends to be the most comfortable
00:02:3100:02:37
position. The other thing I would point out, notice that this foot is flat. I do
00:02:3700:02:40
notice that when people start progressing, they have a tendency to let
00:02:4000:02:45
this foot come up this way. That's just compensation and some extensibility
00:02:4500:02:49
issues, in that sense it would be shortness in her peroneals or
00:02:4900:02:55
fibularis muscles. Let's go ahead and sit over the other side again. So if I wanted to
00:02:5500:02:58
keep progressing this for strength, obviously I could just keep upping
00:02:5800:03:01
the weight. Now I'm going to take the weights away from Laura cause we're going to
00:03:0100:03:06
progress in a different fashion here. Maybe for more complexity and a little
00:03:0600:03:11
more power output we could go to a dynamic lateral lunge. Now, if I'm going to
00:03:1100:03:15
go dynamic I'm going to assume that her static lunge looks really good. She's
00:03:1500:03:19
paying attention to her queues, she has all the extensibility she needs, she stays
00:03:1900:03:23
drawn-in and she's feeling it in her glutes where she should be. So in her
00:03:2300:03:28
dynamic lunge she's going to step out into that same position with the same form,
00:03:2800:03:35
and step right back. Good. Let's go ahead and see a couple of those. Of course, if we
00:03:3500:03:39
had more room on this camera, we could go the other way too. You can either do 10 on
00:03:3900:03:44
one side and 10 the other, or you can keep going back and forth, maybe do 20
00:03:4400:03:48
total or whatever the rep range that you're working within is. We could take
00:03:4800:03:52
this up another level from a stability standpoint,
00:03:5200:03:57
by having her go lateral lunge to balance. This is tricky, definitely a
00:03:5700:04:02
tough exercise. She's going to push up, and now she's got to use the opposite
00:04:0200:04:07
side gluteus medius. She pushed off this gluteus medius and glute max. Now she's
00:04:0700:04:10
got to use this glute medius and glute max to stabilize her hip. So let's go
00:04:1000:04:13
ahead and see a couple more of those.
00:04:1500:04:20
Stabilize. Make sure she's holding for at least three seconds time . We don't want
00:04:2000:04:27
controlled falling, we want her to come up, feel stable, before she goes into her
00:04:2700:04:33
next one. Of course, as she got this down, I could increase instability further by
00:04:3300:04:37
adding some of our balance tools. Make sure you do work with your micro
00:04:3700:04:40
progressions, I might even, before going to the Airex pad, go into just like a
00:04:4000:04:44
yoga mat or walk like an ab mat. Something that has a little bit of
00:04:4400:04:47
squishiness, but is still relatively stable than moving on to
00:04:4700:04:54
these. You can put one under one foot, or one under each foot. Of course we can then add
00:04:5400:04:59
weight back in, add our dumbbells back in to start increasing strength again, and
00:04:5900:05:03
as you may have seen in our other videos, you can start adding our
00:05:0300:05:07
shoulder series to this exercise, and start integrating something we call our
00:05:0700:05:12
lateral subsystem. So this is your frontal plan lunge, all of your form queues,
00:05:1200:05:16
ways to progress your lateral lunge in a bunch of different directions from
00:05:1600:05:22
strength to stability, to complexity and subsystem integration. I hope you have