Walking Lunges Cross Training Workout and Their Amazing Benefits

Have you ever thought how you could gain a perfect fit body without lifting heavy weights? Well, there are lots of exercises that can assure you of an overall fitness and strength improvement without the hassle and nightmare of pulling and pushing heavy loads. The most popular CrossFit workout that can give you exactly this is walking lunges.

Whenever people get into an exercise, their main aim is to achieve overall fitness and particularly tone their muscles. That said, there are parts of the body that subconsciously tend to be left out during these routine workouts. These are the outer and inner thighs. These muscles are important, but surprisingly some athletes are not aware of this. Toning up the inner and outer thighs makes you appealing as well as boosts your athletic performance and promotes hip stability.

Lunges give you an excellent way to strengthen your hips and develop thigh muscles. It mainly concentrates on two types of muscles: the knee extensors and hip extensors. The lunges movement is similar to squatting save for the wide range of motion and stress on the muscles when performing lunges. 

For purposes of discussion and analysis, lunges can be divided into two walking lunges and stationary lunges.

Stationary Lunges

This type of lunge comprises a downward movement where a strong eccentric contraction of the glutes, hams, and quads is exerted. This ensures the whole bodyweight falls on the forward leg. At the same time, the backward leg gives you better support and balance. On the upward movement, both the front and backward legs bear the pressure and push your body back to the standing position.

Walking Lunges

In this lunge, the downward movement remains almost the same with an equal amount of pressure exerted on the thigh and leg muscles. However, on the upward movement, the focus is on the forward leg. The muscles of this leg contract to stand straight again. If there is one thing you need throughout this CrossFit exercise, it is stability.

Since walking lunges are preferred to stationary lunges because they utilize all the thigh and leg muscles, they do not work the rear leg muscles as effectively, and this is why it is critical that you perform both stationary lunges and walking lunges at regular intervals.

What You Gain from Walking Lunges

There are lots of benefits, which you can get from walking lunges some of which include:

Improved Balance –Since the lunges workout involves both sides of your body, it helps in improving coordination and balance.

Boosts Functionality –Walking lunges train your body in a way to improve its functionality as well as helping you to acquire a better body posture.

Symmetrical Toning –By the fact that walking lunges focus on some of the most ignored parts of your body, they help in achieving a symmetrically toned body. They address some of the other body parts which other exercises overlook.

Improves Hip Flexibility –Walking lunges enhances the flexibility of your hip flexor muscles which may become tight because of the sedentary lifestyle most of us lead.

In addition to the above benefits, including walking lunges in your CrossFit training routine enhance core stability, tone gluteal muscles, and gives rest to your spine.