How to Do Side Lunges (Form & Benefits)

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January 13, 2022 9 min read

The side lunge is a popular leg-strengthening exercise with a full arsenal of variations that can add a great deal of variety to your regular workouts. It is important to vary your technique to help you emphasize different muscles or parts of those muscles.

This article will show you how effective they can be when it comes to improving your overall lower-body strength.

Using Side Lunges in Your Daily Life

The side lunge can help you prevent injuries, and it is an excellent rehabilitation tool after injuries occur. It can also be considered part of a foundational strength program or rehab protocol, because it helps athletes and casual exercisers to return to their sport or workout routine as quickly as possible.

This is an extremely functional exercise that prepares you for many of the movements you will make in your daily life.

Many people lunge naturally to get up from the ground. The movement of the lunge is similar to many of the movements and muscle-activation patterns of daily activities like walking and running or using stairs. Lunges are excellent lower-body exercises to train a lot of muscles at once.

Muscles Worked

When you do a side lunge, many muscles work to both mobilize and stabilize the body. These muscles include the quadriceps, the hamstrings, the gluteals,the calves (gastrocnemius and soleus), the transverse abdominis, the multifidus, the obliques, and the erector spinae. The muscles of the lower body, namely the quads, glutes, and hamstrings, work both concentrically (shortening) and eccentrically (lengthening) during side lunges.

The most basic version of a lunge is the forward lunge.

It involves stepping forward, lowering your body toward the ground, and returning back to the starting position. This is what most people mean when they say they are “doing lunges.” In the beginning of the exercise, your leg muscles work together to control the impact of your foot’s landing. As you lower your body to the ground further (the eccentric phase of the movement) your muscles are lengthening under tension to control the movement. The quadriceps decelerate your landing and work with your hamstrings and gluteals (glutes) to control your descent.

The muscles in both the front and back leg work eccentrically, but the glute and hamstring muscles tend to work a bit harder in the front leg. The step-back phase involves a dynamic push back to the starting position. The same muscles forcefully contract to push the body upright. This is known as the concentric phase of the movement, because the muscles are shortening (contracting) to move your body. One reason a side lunge is so effective is because of the amount of work it takes out of your body in the eccentric phase.

Research shows that eccentric muscle contraction is more effective than concentric muscle contraction in terms of both hypertrophy and muscle size.

So to recap: most lunges mainly work the gluteals, quadriceps, and hamstrings of your legs. All of these muscles lengthen during the eccentric phase as you lower to the ground, and they all contract during the concentric phase when you return your body to your original starting position.

The side lunge is a common warm-up exercise for both weight training and general athletics, and it is often performed simply until you feel enough burn, rather than for a number of reps and sets. If you want to think of them in those terms, you can consider ten lunge movements to be equal to one set and each lunge can be equal to one repetition.

Main Benefits of Lunges

Lunges offer a ton of benefits. Perhaps the biggest one is that they work several muscle groups of the lower body at the same time. This makes them important for many strengthening and injury prevention programs, such as for anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injury prevention.

Lunges are considered a unilateral exercise due to the workload required of the left leg compared to the right leg.

As unilateral movements, side lunges improve your balance and stability. The mechanics of the lunge are similar to those of running. The step out to landing is similar to the movements of a running stride, but without the large ground reaction force. This makes the lunge a good way to build stronger muscles to absorb the impact of higher intensity movements.

Also, the opposing muscles of the legs are worked at the same time when you do side lunges. This can mean increased efficiency and a better resistance program. If you only have time to do a few exercises, it is always better to choose those exercises that work multiple joints at the same time.

All of this means that lunges are very important for both strengthening and injury prevention. They are functional exercises that train a wide range of muscles across the hips, knees, and ankle joints at the same time.

They also challenge your core stability in a variety of ways by simply forcing your body to make unilateral movement patterns.

How to Do Side Lunges (Form)

Start in a standing position with your feet hip-width apart.
Step forward longer than a walking stride so one leg is ahead of your torso and the other leg is behind. Your right foot should land flat and remain flat on the ground. Your rear heel will naturally rise off of the ground.
Bend your knees to about 90 degrees as you lower yourself. Keep your core engaged and your trunk upright.
Finally, forcefully push off from your front leg to return to the starting position.

A few pointers:

You should not let your right knee go past your toes as you lower toward the ground.
Your right knee should not touch the ground.
Keep your hips symmetrical at the same height, without dropping the hip of your back leg or raising the hip of your front leg.
Contract your abdominals during the movement to keep your trunk upright. Keep your feet hip-width apart during the landing and the return.

Some Lunge Variations

Once you have mastered the basic lunge, you can choose from a wide list of variations in your workouts. Each variation works the same muscles but puts more emphasis on certain areas as opposed to others. You can do a different version each workout or combine different variations to add a level of variety and challenge to your workout.

Static Lunge

The static lunge, also known as the split squat, involves neither the step out nor the return step. This makes it easier to perform for those who have knee pain or as an introduction to lunging exercises. This exercise is similar to the forward lunge because it works the medial and lateral quadriceps muscles.