SMASH Fitness Personal Training

Are you training in planes other than the sagittal?

If you think about it, you'll do leg extensions and it's in the sagittal plane, Squats we'll do those in the sagittal plane, we'll even do lunges in this plane.

HOWEVER! we can do lunges in a different way and the benefit is relying on more muscles than just your quads, infact you have a lot of muscles on the inside of your leg. I'm talking about the Adductors on the inside of your leg and the Abductors on the outside and we can hit all of them with this 3-dimensional lunges.

So start off by doing a standard forward lunge (sagittal plane), then go into a side lunge (this is known as the frontal plane), then finally into a drop step lunge (this is the transverse plane).

If you want to build muscle in your legs you simply need to incorporate frontal and transverse plane exercises into your routine.

We all love our lateral side raises for the side delts why not give this variation a try, here I'm only using 4kg dumbbells (but they felt like 15kg after a few reps) it's a 1 & 1/2 rep side raise.

Start with your arms elevated were you can feel your delts engaging then begin to lift upwards controlling the concentric. As you start to bring the weights down stop part way and go back up again before returning to the start position, your middle delts will light up & burn like crazy.

Leg Press Tips:

We all like the leg press its our go to when we want a break from Squats. (Which you shouldn't)

HOWEVER!!! due to the angle that we put ourselves in and with both feet set on the plate to do this exercise your lower back becomes pinned to the pad and becomes more difficult to maintain a natural lumbar curve as your knees bend and come closer to your chest.

As you come futher down your pelvis will begin to round forward while pinned between the weight and the pad behind you.

To help counter this do one leg at a time, by keeping one leg down you keep your pelvis locked a d will be prevented from rotating as the weight comes down making it safer for your lower back.

Level up your straight arm pull downs