 Do you have knee pain when you lunge? Not anymore. I'm gonna walk through some common mistakes during the lunge and some quick and easy fixes that you can try that sometimes just make things magically get better. So there are four mistakes in the lunges. Tony's here to help me out. We're gonna walk through these mistakes. So first one, Tony, if you can give us a side view. Sometimes as people step forward into the lunge, they catch themselves with their toe a lot. So much so that the heel comes up off the ground. And Tony, if you could show us that knee pushing forward to really long step, these are all very common, really short step even. You just, you lose the balance of the pressure of the heel in the foot. It's kind of like you're doing your lunge on stilts rather than a full leg with a nice flat foot. So all I think about on this, Tony, is when you're stepping forward, just make sure that you, I might even land with the heel first and really exaggerate that stomp and see if you can get good heel pressure on that one. Yeah, I like that good. That's pretty good. So you came forward a little bit on that one. Just stay back on the heel. Yeah, that's better. Nice, and you can rest. So this one can be kind of hard, especially if your ankle is stiff. So if you need something like that, I just like the cue looseness in the ankle when I contact that heel in the ground. So that's our first mistake. Our second mistake is gonna be, Tony, if you could give us a front view here. We are looking for knee alignment where the hip, the knee, and the ankle are all in a straight line. And when, if you lunge forward and the knee comes inward, you're increasing the amount of shear stress that goes through the knee. And you're kind of shutting off the glutes. So if you've ever gone to physical therapy and they said your glutes were weak, this is kind of what they're talking about. So Tony, actually take a step back and then we're gonna do the same thing, but just show me, not too hard, but show me that knee collapsing inward as you step forward. There you go. And what you'll notice if you watch it from the side is he kind of loses this heel pressure, the heel kind of tilts in when he does that. So what I like to cue on this one first, let's do a split squat real quick. So one foot forward, one foot back. And I just like to make sure that this static version of the lunge can be done correctly because the dynamic nature of the forward lunge is a lot tougher to actually get the timing right. So Tony, just come on down. Show me the mistake where your knee comes inward too much. So if it looks like this, I'm gonna say, Tony, let's just hold at the bottom for a quick sec, push that knee out into my hand and make sure that heel stays down. Yes, just like that. And now come back up. Now hit that again on another rep. So if you can do it on the split squat pretty reliably now, Tony, let's try it on the forward lunge. Yeah. Yeah. That's wonderful. And so that's, I like to break it up that way. Definitely start with the split squat when you're cueing something like that. You don't wanna make it too complicated. All right, that's our second mistake. Now our third mistake is a lot of times people will overload the trailing leg. You'll arch your back too much and a nice stretch in that back thigh. Yeah, something like that, something like that. So if you're set up this way, you can rest. I don't wanna do that to you too much. You don't have the torso relationship that unlocks the mobility of the hips. So we've got to get that first. So if you're doing that and you're just kinda stuck in this position for every rep, then we gotta set that up first in, you know, before you execute the exercise. So the first thing, Tony, that I like to do on this one is put your hands on your belly, exhale, bring your belly back, just a little bit. And sometimes I'll say a little bit of a slouch, especially if the chest is really sticking out. So hold on to this position. You should actually feel your abs a little bit better as you do your lunge. Now try a lunge from there. And that's wonderful. Now, sometimes if you feel like you're still loading the back leg too much and when you lunge out you don't get at least 80% of your weight on the front leg, then just lean forward a little bit as you lunge, can you show me a little bit of that? Yeah, even that much is kind of okay. He's got a little bit of a bend in his back so I might not cue that for him because he was already doing it well. The other thing that I wanted to show, so sometimes people will overload that back leg in their driving back up. So when you do something like this, you're using your body's mass to kinda like contort yourself like a slinky back up rather than treating that front leg more like a leg press and actually driving with that leg. You wanna really try to emphasize the push through the ground there and make sure that you're not cheating your shoulders back. Can you show me that? Yeah, that's actually really good. I don't mean to be so surprised. Our fourth and our final mistake is what I like to call the floppy spine. As you do your lunges you want it to be a leg exercise, you don't want it to be a back exercise. So as people, and this is what Tony was doing a little bit earlier when we were doing the lean back thing, as I cued him to lean forward, he rounded as he stepped forward and then he moved his back a lot on the way up. All this means is it's less about the leaning of the torso and the, like I said, using your momentum, your mass to kinda pull yourself up. And it's more just about unloading the hips throughout the entire movement, which we don't want. We want to load the hips, we wanna load the glutes and that will unlock the quads to do most of the movement. So can you show me like a pretty big collapse, maybe even a heel rise as you lunge out and then totally lose your hip tuck on the way up? Yes, yes. Now Tony's pretty good at lunges so this looks a little artificial, but this is the idea, right? And it's more on the forward lunge, it's definitely more obvious when you step forward and you get that round. So just make sure, Tony, on this one I like to think stay tall through the top of your head. I'm almost not tall enough to touch the top of your head, isn't that weird? And stay tall as you lunge out now. Yeah, that looks good. Do one more. Yeah, that's pretty good. As you step out, one more, try to keep your elbows up a little higher. Yeah, yeah, I like that a lot more. So Tony was just shutting off his abs a little bit cause his torso, his chest here was sticking out a little bit. So as we drive the elbows forward, that turns on the serratus anterior, pulls the rib cage back and the abs have more leverage to turn on now. Sometimes, despite your best efforts coaching and nailing all the points that Lance talked about, it can still be too much load through the front leg and that could be uncomfortable in some individuals. There's one simple, easy tweak that you can make that can reduce the load through the front leg, still allowing you to get the gains from your lunge but in a more comfortable manner. And that folks is elevating the front leg. So I may have Tony stand at just exactly how he did when he was performing the forward lunge but this time we're raising the ground up like we're Josh Groban. So what I'm gonna do here is I want Tony to go ahead and step forward onto the box, same four cues that we're doing with Lance and then back just like that. I'm gonna watch a few things that way. Looks pretty good. So what you'll notice is when Tony is doing this, he's getting a lot of rounding through the lumbar spine. Now a lot of times what will happen in that case is when you see that they're shoving their center of mass forward, that's putting a lot of load through the front leg. Well, that was the uncomfortable portion. So how can we minimize that compensation? I'm glad you asked. I might just simply make this move just a little bit more hingey as he steps forward. So what I'm gonna have Tony do is I want Tony, I want you to go ahead and unlock your knees. You're gonna push your hips back just like that with the chest going down. Keep that slight hinge, do the same step forward. So when we do this, we can minimize, you'll see he's a little crunchy still. Hold on, I'm gonna have you nice and slow. Hips back, step slowly forward, down. That's where I want you right there and then back up. So some of this is a bit of a depth issue with Tony as he gets lower and it may not be that he has adequate hip motion to be able to get as low as we need him in this particular version. Go ahead. A little slower on the lower, look straight ahead. So if you notice a lot of rounding, what you're gonna do is I want the knees to be unlocked. You're gonna push the hips back, look forward. Give me a nice exhale there. And I want you to just barely dip down on this Tony. So you're gonna go ahead and step forward. So you'll see right there, he is immediately bending forward. We got a couple options here. One, I could have him just go ahead and do the step forward and hold position just to see if that gives him a little bit more range of motion. So what you're gonna do is go ahead, unlock, get the hips, look straight ahead, get a nice soft exhale, Tony. Go ahead and step forward, drop down, like right there. And so I'm gonna have Tony just hold this for a little bit. Maybe you have him do like a five count hold, silent in and out through the nose. Thanks for watching. If you learned something, hit the like button and subscribe to be notified when I release new videos. If you feel like you've mastered your lunge, but it still doesn't feel quite right, maybe you still have some knee pain lingering around. Well, I enlisted my buddy Zach Couples to make this video up here. He's gonna outline a bunch of different assistance exercises to help increase your body's mobility. Sometimes your brain knows what to do, but it can't access it. It just can't find it. If you fall into that bucket, definitely watch Zach's video because I think some of those are gonna be eye opening or knee opening.