How To Do The Perfect Stationary Lunge

By: Chris Freytag, CPT

Chris Freytag demonstrates a Stationary Lunge

Stationary lunges are one of the best ways to work your entire lower body. You can do them anywhere—even on a walk with your friends—to give you firmer glutes, stronger legs and improved balance! Not only that, but in order to keep a tall spine and solid balance, you will develop more core strength and learn how to tighten your abs to keep your back aligned. Let’s learn how to do the perfect stationary lunge and how to incorporate them into your workouts for toned, beautiful legs!

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    How To Do Stationary Lunges

      1. Stand tall with your feet hip distance apart then take a large step backward with one foot. This is your start position.
      2. Lower the back knee to a 90 degree angle so both knees are bent then press up to start position and repeat.  After desired number of reps, switch legs.

    Be sure to keep your chest lifted, chin up and abs contracted so your back stays straight. Next, During the lunge, make sure you’re balanced on your back toes and your front knee is in line with your ankle. Squeeze your glutes when you rise! We recommend starting with twelve lunges for each leg, unweighted. Once you have that down, work yourself up to three sets! You can add to the move by grabbing some dumbbells to hold or placing a barbell on your shoulders.

    Benefits of Stationary Lunges

    There are many benefits to the stationary lunge and just as many reasons you should incorporate them into your workouts. Learning how to do a stationary lunge will work your thighs, firm up your backside, and can help condition your legs for everyday movements. Here are just a few benefits of lunges:

    They Work All Your Leg Muscles

    There are so many leg exercises available including dozens of different types of squats and lunges. Stationary lunges, however, are a great low-impact leg exercise. The low-impact quality will help you avoid putting pressure and impact on your knees and joints. Rather, by lowering and lifting in a fixed position, you work every leg muscle including your quads, hamstrings and calves.

    Tone Your Glutes

    Stationary lunges are particularly effective at targeting your glutes. Sometimes the glutes fail to “fire” or get used properly. By focusing your weight on your heel as you press up, the stationary lunge allows you to target the glutes and teach them to work as they should. Nice, tight glutes are a great by-product of the stationary lunge!

    Improve Your Balance And Stability

    The stationary lunge requires your core body to stabilize because you are balancing on the ball of your back foot. Additionally your feet are separate from front to back so that, in itself, requires a different way of standing. In order to stay steady you tighten your abs and keep your posture tall. Great training for your core!

    What Muscles Do Stationary Lunges Work?

    Stationary Lunges work nearly every lower body muscle including your glutes, quads, hamstrings and calves. They’re a great move to incorporate in your lower body workouts and they require zero equipment—just your own bodyweight!

    How Many Calories Do Lunges Burn?

    People often ask how many calories they are burning in their workouts. Stationary Lunges will generally burn about 100 calories for every 10 minutes you are working. As in everything, the harder you work the more calories you burn.

    Incorporating Stationary Lunge Into Your Workouts

    Stationary Lunges can be done on their own and give you great results. But you can also incorporate the lunges into a plan with other exercises and get a good warm-up, leg day or full body workout.

    Use Stationary Lunges In Your Warm Up

    Because the stationary lunge takes you through a full range of motion with your legs, hips and hip flexors, it serves as a good exercise to use during your warm-up to help prepare you for other workouts. Just move slowly and with a big rage of motion.

    Sample Warm-Up

      • 5 inchworms
      • 10 hip circles
      • 10 stationary lunges right
      • 10 arm circles forward
      • 10 arm circles backward
      • 10 stationary lunges left

    Use Stationary Lunges In A Lower Body Workout

    Working your leg muscles can be an intense training session. Use this series for your “leg day” and you’ll feel be amazed at your results. Get a set of dumbbells and do each exercise for the number of repetitions listed with just a few seconds in between to rest.

    Lovely Leg Day Workout

    Use Stationary Lunges In Your Circuit Training

    Circuits are a fun way to exercise and get your strength and cardio in all at the same time. The idea behind circuits are to go from one move, or one “station” to the next with little or not rest in between. Check this out:

    Full-Body Circuit Training Workout

    Move directly from one exercise to the next with little to no break in between. Rest for 1 minute at the end, then repeat the sequence.

    Rest 1 minute. Repeat. Stretch.

    Here are 3 more workouts for you to try that incorporate Stationary Lunge:

    Looking for more ways to keep your lunges interesting and challenging? Try changing directions, adding a medicine ball or adding tempo changes! You can also incorporate the Stationary Lunge to Overhead Press to add upper body strength to the mix. Our Basic Total Body Workout, which includes: basic squats, push-ups, stationary lunge, overhead press (combine these into one!), plank, bicep curl and tricep overhead extensions is an awesome workout to try!

    Other Exercises Similar to Stationary Lunge

    Lunges are the perfect way to get toned, strong legs and glutes, but there are other moves that will help with that as well. Check out a few of these!

    Targets: glutes, quads, hamstrings

    (This will help us personalize your experience so that you can get the best advice possible from us!)
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