Kettlebell Technique Basics | The Lunge

Why do it?

Lunges are highly functional from the perspective of activities of daily living right through to sport specific training. The standard lunge works the thighs, glutes, lower back, core stability and taxes your balances. The number of muscles involved means it is a great challenge to the nervous system and also makes a large impact on the hormonal and cardiovascular systems.

How to do it.

Initially make sure you are comfortable with body weight lunges first before you add additional weight. It is dangerous to load up any movement with additional weight if you don’t have the ability to perform a body weight version of that movement first. In addition to this, if you experience pain as a result of lunging then please stop the exercise and seek further advice. It will inevitably be due to incorrect muscle firing and will require some specialist advice beyond the scope of this article.

1. Initially stand with your feet together and place a kettlebell on the floor in front of you.
2. Clean the kettlebell and get it into the racked position.
3. Now for the actual lunge. Brace your abdominals as if about to take a punch. Keeping your eyes forward, take a large stride forward with one leg. Land on the heel, rolling forward on to the ball of your foot and as you do so bend the lead leg down to 90 degrees. As you do so the trailing leg should also end up at an angle of 90 degrees. The knee of the trailing leg should remain of the floor but only just. Make sure your body remains upright as you lunge down. Your lead leg and your training leg should both be at 90 degrees at the bottom of the movement.
4. From this position, press back powerfully to your original position bringing the feet back in line. Compose yourself, check for bracing and repeat but this time with the opposing leg. Try to resist the temptation to do all the reps on one leg before switching. The trailing leg has to work quite hard in the lunge. Performing all of your reps on one side before switching will overly fatigue the trailing leg and as a consequence will disadvantage that leg when you switch.

The lunge, start and end positions