No More Thunder Thighs!
As a fitness trainer, I get a lot of questions regarding “What exercises are best for ______” fill in the blank. For my female clients, the thighs and glutes are the most common concern. Well today I’m going to share my personal favorite lower body exercise and all of its awesome variations. It’s called the Rear-Foot Elevated Lunge Variation (a.k.a. Bulgarian Split Squat). This exercise is so effective that you’ll pretty much make your body thunder-thigh proof once you master it!
Before we get into this, one thing I definitely don’t want to do is feed into the idea of individual body part training and spot reduction on certain areas of the body. There is no such thing! You can’t do situps to get the flab off your gut, and there’s no single exercise to get the fat of your butt! Total body training is the key to effectively eliminate the body fat that is hiding those areas that people are having trouble seeing – the stubborn fat areas that prevent a good body from becoming a great body. Plus, a diet high in lean protein, fiber, and green veggies and low in unnatural fats and refined sugars and starches is absolutely necessary to bring out your best. It is also important to know that you lose fat in a genetically predetermined way. You can do all the crunches you want but without total body training, proper eating habits, and enough time to get to those stubborn fat areas you will never get rid of your gut, jiggly arms, or the unnatural desire to get out the thighmaster.
Alright so here we go – my favorite family of lower body exercises. The Lunge – pretty exciting huh? Actually – Yes! Lunge variations are my favorite because I prefer single leg exercise in lieu of their double leg counterparts for a lot of reasons. For people with back issues, single leg exercises allow them to safely perform lower body exercises without putting their lower lumbar spine in jeopardy of hyper flexion or excessive rounding that can injure. It is also very common to have strength and flexibility imbalances between the right and left side, so it’s important to address one leg at a time to really shore up the weak links from the start.
My favorite lunge variation is called the rear foot elevated lunge. So basically we’re going to elevate the back foot on a chair, bench, box, or any other sturdy foot support, usually about 12-18 inches high. You’ll put your front leg well in front of you in order to make sure that your front knee and ankle are lined up. In general, I tell people to exaggerate how far you put your front leg forward so that the front knee is almost slightly behind the ankle as this really helps reduce sheer force on the knees. Initiate the exercise by loading the front heel and dropping your hips as low as you can in a pain-free range of motion while staying really tall up top with a proud chest and shoulders down and back. Finish the rep by explosively driving through your front heel to return to the top of the movement. You can start with body weight only in search of front thigh parallel to the floor or lower depth and then progress by adding speed of movement or by adding dumbbells. You can even incorporate some very cool combination movements with this lower body exercise like adding a curl to press at the top of the movement or even by raising dumbbells overhead to really challenge your core and single-leg balance and stability.
I have yet to find an exercise that hits the legs as hard as this baby does. In particular, it really helps strengthen your vastus medialis muscle, that inner quad muscle that looks like a teardrop, that’s heavily responsible for tracking your patella and keeping your knee caps in line. So if you have a history of overtraining or patella-femoral issues this exercise is phenomenal for keeping your knees as bulletproof as possible.
Also, what’s great about it too is that it provides a very good stretch for the hip flexor of your back leg, an area that is often very tight, especially for guys. Any exercise that allows you to simultaneously stretch and strengthen your body is a real keeper. So get off the fancy machines, and start cranking it with something that really works, and start today!
Get It Done!
Nancy