7 Health Benefits Of Lunges

Not sure if anyone likes leg day at the gym. However, the pain caused by the leg day can be satisfying for many. Lunges are not particularly leg exercises, but it is related to whole lower body workup. Lunges are a powerful exercise, allowing you to shape and strengthen almost every muscle in the lower body hips, glutes, quads, hamstrings, and calves. It helps strengthen your lower body, increase core strength, and muscle tissue and help you get the perfect buttocks you always hoped for. 

The best part about lunges is that it does not require any equipment, is incredibly safe and easy to learn. The lunge is also a unilateral exercise, meaning you train one side of your body at a time. It makes the lunge the best for identifying and correcting any muscle imbalances you have between your left and right side. 

5 Types of Lunges

1. Stationary Lunges

This type of lunge exercise benefits and targets your lower body like the thighs, glutes, and hamstrings. It includes a downward movement that involves an eccentric contraction of the hams, quads, and glutes. 

In stationary lunges, you can put your weight on your front leg and use your back leg to balance, stabilize, and support your entire body.

2. Side Lunges

Side lunges target your inner and outer thighs, quadriceps, hips, and legs. It provides you with stability, balance, and strength. Side lunges train your body to move side to side, which is a nice change from your body’s regular movements.

3. Walking Lunges

The walking variation targets your core, hips, and glutes and improves overall stability. In this type, the downward movement remains the same, with the same pressure are put on all the leg and thigh muscles. You can make walking lunges exercise difficult by adding weights. You can hold a dumbbell in each hand while doing this exercise.

4. Reverse Lunges

Reverse lunges activate your core, glutes, and hamstrings. It is ideal for people who have knee concerns, difficulty balancing, or less hip mobility.

5. Twist Lunges

Twist lunges target your ankle and foot muscles. You can add a twist to stationary, walking, or reverse lunges to activate your core and glutes more deeply.

Benefits of Lunges

1. Improve Balance and Coordination of the Body

Luges improve the balance and coordination of our body drastically. They are lower-body unilateral exercises since you work on each side of your body independently. Lunges require a single-leg performance that needs joint stability and control that increases the neurological and muscular demands. This workout engages your core and abdominal muscles. A strong core allows you to deal with lower back pain and improves your balance and posture.

2. Weight Loss

Lunges are one of the best exercises for weight loss. Lunges benefits large muscle groups in your lower body will target by lunges which build lean muscle and reduces body fat. It also increases your resting metabolism, which allows you to burn more calories and trim excess weight.

3. Boost Flexibility

Flexor muscles from the lower part of our body are ignored while doing exercise. Walking lunges boost the flexibility of the hip flexor muscles, which tend to become tight due to the sedentary lifestyle we lead. Walking lunges increase the flexibility of the hip flexor muscles, which tend to become tight due to the sedentary lifestyle we lead.

4. Gluteal Muscle Activation

The Gluteus muscle is one of the ignored muscle groups during regular workouts. The glutes can work for enhancements in power output, decreased lower back pain, and speed. Walking lunges can help focus on their activation and mobilize them with regular practice.

5. Provide Muscular Symmetry

Correcting muscular asymmetry is one of the best benefits of lunges. There are chances of muscular asymmetries that go unnoticed or unaddressed due to the amounts of bilateral. Hence, performing lunges and other unilateral exercises can increase muscular hypertrophy and strength in a weaker leg, diminishing movement and developmental asymmetries and compensation patterning.

6. Better Spinal Health

Lunges provide strength and stability to the spine. While working on other parts of your body, lunges take a load off your spine to make it flexible and pain-free.

7. Minimizes Risk of Injury

Lunges do not prevent injury, but they strengthen the muscles (big and small) that improve your ability to stabilize under a heavy load.

Practising free-weight exercises like lunges might have large acute metabolic responses when compared to full-body weight exercises like a burpee.

Dr. Siddharth Gupta, B.A.M.S, M.D (Ayu)

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Muscles Affected by Lunges

The most important feature is that lunges help gain muscle mass, build body strength, and tone your body. The core muscles, buttocks, and legs are majorly benefitted from lunges. A person who does lunges during their workout is sure to have an improved posture and range of motion. Lunges can effectively target the following muscles, abdominals, back muscles, gluteal muscles, quadriceps, hamstrings, and calves.

How to Get Effective Results?

Lunges are accessible, easy workout moves that can be added to your daily routine. The results you get after doing lunges are unbeatable. However, it is not a miracle to happen overnight. You need to stay consistent and must stay on a daily track to see results for yourself.

If you add a few sets of lunges to your everyday workout regime, you will definitely notice changes in terms of the building of muscle mass and shaping your body. After a few weeks, if basic lunges start getting easy for you, throw in a challenge and increase your intensity by doing more difficult variations of lunges, like adding weights or increasing the amount you usually do.

How to Do Lunges Properly?

Doing a proper form of lunges is always important when exercising in order to work the correct muscles and avoid any workout strain and injury.

1. Stand with your feet hip-width apart and hands on your hips. 
2. Squeeze your glutes and ensure the front of your hips are facing forward.
3. Step forward with your right or left leg, ensuring that your feet are still hip-width apart. 
4. Keeping your spine totally straight and perpendicular to the floor, slowly lower your body down toward the ground. 
5. Bring both legs into a 90-degree angle with the front knee over the front ankle and the back knee directly under the hip. 
6. Press back through the front foot to return to the starting position, and repeat on the opposite leg. 

Avoid slouching or curving your back, it is important to maintain your posture while doing lunges. If these steps are followed, you will get effective benefits from lunges without any workout injury.

During the later stages of pregnancy, your lower body bears all the extra weight. Practising stepping lunges during pregnancy is highly beneficial to strengthen the lower body. Additionally, it might help in maintaining the balance of the body as the centre of gravity shifts during pregnancy.

Dr. Rajeev Singh, BAMS

Precautions

1. Concentrate on your breathing and practice walking lunges under proper supervision as there are chances of falling.

2. Engage your core and balance your torso and hip while doing lunges exercise to get all the lunges benefits.

3. Keep your spine and upper body erect while performing walking lunges.

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