Tutorial: Suspended Lunge
The Suspended Lunge is a natural movement exercise that summons different movements from those considered to be the natural movement pillars, including standing, descending motion, locomotion. It’s a natural movement that can be trained to boost your sports performance, primarily to improve your running skills.
By performing Suspended Lunges, we can bring our body to perform a coordinated movement between legs and stabilize the trunk and train the body on a functional perspective, using “standing”, the basic natural movement pillar, and adding the descending single-leg motion, before returning to standing alignment.
The dynamics of this exercise demands using upper body balance, lower body strength and mixing both to move in a controlled, coordinated motion the full body, changing the balance of the body’s center of mass.
This motion involves movements such as squatting, single-leg lunging, climbing and single-leg upward lifting.
By moving up and down, you create a vertical displacement of the body center of mass, which will involve leg strength (quadriceps, hamstrings and glutes), and at the same time, it creates the need to activate the hip stabilization muscles and core muscles too, to rebalance and prevent falling.
Repeating the movement, you establish a pattern very similar to the ones found in the running techniques that help you synchronize the entire body and get a more fluid and efficient running.
WHAT
- The Suspended Lunge is a functional exercise performed standing, single-leg descending and rising.
- Strengthens your legs (quadriceps, hamstrings and glutes).
- Promotes hip and trunk stabilization.
- Activates all trunk muscles and trains the balance.
HOW
- With the bar placed on its lowest level, nearest to the floor, hold the lateral supports with both hands and step up to the bar.
- Try to stabilize your hip and trunk maintaining your balance on a single foot.
- Stabilize your scapula and activate your abs.
- Flex the knee of your suspended leg, and let it approach the floor (try not to touch it), envision an imaginary line rising straight up from the tip of your front foot – avoid going over that line with your knee.
- Rise back up pushing the heel firmly against the ground for stabilization until you get to a vertical position.
- Use your arms, moving them back and forth to help your balance.
WHY
- Allows you to control your body on a vertical body mass displacement and provides balance.
- Strengthens quadriceps, hamstrings and glutes.
- Activates the hip stabilization muscles and core muscles.
- Continually trying to find a balance can prevent falls and injuries in everyday life.
