For me injury rehabilitation and sports performance enhancement are one and the same just at opposite ends of the spectrum. With both issues you are looking to increase function in a particular joint or muscle group, but in injury rehab, the end result is to get out of pain, and sports performance it is to go faster or lift heavier. In this article along with the video I am going to look at the lunge again, start to increase the intensity again and then come back to the original lunge with the same weight and see if our technique has improved any.

Video of Lunge Progression

Now before with the lunge we regressed the exercise down by lowering the weight, reducing the height, changing the angles in the feet, taking further pressure off using a suspension kit and on the whole just getting the client much more comfortable with the lunge in general. Again the list I have provided is not exhaustive, it just gives you an idea of where to go. The beauty of the Faster process is that every trainer will do it slightly differently and no one is wrong just the better trainers hit the right exercises at the right time.

Now for the best way to progress is to start with something that is easily achievable. This builds confidence and begins to get the muscles used to different movements. In this case I have begun with some 3D lunges with extra emphasis on the frontal and transverse planes. Next I start to bring some extra weight back in with the dumbbells. I also extend the lunge far beyond the original, I really work the extension of the back hip and force the front hip to deal with a greater load. This movement pattern allows the hip flexors to become much more influential in the movement and allows the back leg to generate power and thus spread the load of the exercise over both legs rather than a front leg dominant exercise.

Next I start to add arm drivers to the lunge, for me this is important as it elicits a reaction within “the core” to help stabilise the body, as the core has to deal with forces driving many different directions to keep the client standing up. Arm drivers also exaggerate the effect on the hip. Driving the arms forward and down exaggerates hip flexion, overhead emphasizes hip extension, to the side exaggerates rotation and so on. Arm drivers are a great way of changing what is happening in the hip whilst keeping the exercise as close to the original as possible. For truly effective functional training the exercise should look as similar as possible to the original exercise or movement, to have the brain believe it is the same and so enforce the movement pattern whilst still creating a very different feelings within the joints. It may sound a bit far fetched but as you can see from the results it’s very effective.

Finally I have brought in some Jops with the different arm drivers. This is where the intensity starts to really increase. This particular type of training is very effective for field or court sport athletes. We teach the feet, hips and spine to load with impact and speed. Like I mentioned in my functional football article about training muscles as pumps and springs this comes into play here. When we go through a greater range of motion we work the muscle as a pump, think of the quads in this case, in the original lunge they extend as the knee bends and then pump the body back to the original position. With a Jop, they hit the ground, react very quickly and spring the body back. This is much more applicable to pitch and court sports. And as can be seen here there is a little cross over and both can be used to train the other. I will go into this in further depth in my next article.

And so to the finished product, I don’t feel I need to say too much when you see the before and after. The first lunge was performed after a typical five minute warm up. I then videoed pretty much my entire workout of regression and progression and the whole thing took about 35 mins and massive improvements can clearly be seen showing that changing movement patterns and improving performance should be monitored in a minute by minute basis rather than month by month basis. As a trainer if your not doing this then I think you should reconsider your training methods and if you have a trainer and they aren’t doing this then you should reconsider your trainer.