Exercises and Workouts – Are You Making These Mistakes While Doing A Walking Lunge?

Exercises and Workouts – Are You Making These Mistakes While Doing A Walking Lunge?

A walking lunge is one of the best lower body exercises you can be doing if you want to take your fitness up a notch. It is designed to work the glutes, hamstrings, quads, calves, as well as your core, so will help build strength while also assisting with your fat loss goals.

Many people make a few critical mistakes which can lead to sacrificed results. Let’s take a closer look at three classic mistakes you might be making while making a walking lunge…

1. Leaning Too Far Forward. The first mistake commonly made is leaning too far forward as you execute the exercise. If you do this, you not only put your lower back at risk for pain but, you may also take some of the stress off the glute muscle, resulting in much less overall muscle activation.

Instead, you want to keep your back upright, thinking of opening up your chest as you lunge forward with each leg.

If you hold a barbell across your back rather than a set of dumbbells down by your sides, you should find this helps fix this problem.

2. Letting Your Knees Move Inward. Next, double-check your knees are moving directly over your toes. You want to be careful you do not let your knees move inward or outward as you go through your exercise as this can place a significant strain on the tendons and ligaments within your knee joint.

If you find yourself doing this, it could be because the inner or outer thigh muscle is not well-developed, so consider performing some adduction and abduction exercises to help resolve this.

3. Not Directing The Weight To Your Heel. Finally, the last mistake you want to avoid as you go about your walking lunges is not leading the weight to your heel as you should. When you think of placing the weight over the heel as you do the exercise, this will help engage the glute more and keep you targeting the right muscles.

Putting the weight on your heel goes hand in hand with not leaning too far forward. If you think of keeping the weight balanced between the legs, this should help fix this problem.

So keep these points in mind next time you are hitting the gym for some walking lunges. Make this move correctly, and you will be on the road to seeing excellent results with your lower body development.