How To: Reverse Barbell Lunge | 3 GOLDEN RULES (GLUTES, QUADS & HAMSTRINGS) – ScottHermanFitness

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Progressing with exercises that take after a natural movement pattern is always the best way to train as long as you can maintain proper form and focus on improving your mind-muscle connection.

So if you have mastered bodyweight lunges, now is the time to take the next “step” and begin lunging with a barbell across your shoulders! Just make sure you follow these 3 Golden Rules!

Today, we are going to talk about to perform a Reverse Barbell Lunge to train your hamstrings, quads and glutes! Now, I recently released a video called “Leg Day Scare”, where I REALLY injured my hamstring in my right leg while lunging and I thought what better time to show you what you should avoid and what you should pay extra attention to when performing this movement.

Now, I don’t want to scare you. The Reverse Barbell Lunge is not a dangerous exercise and my injury was kind of a freak thing that only happened because I had an old injury from my late teens that never quite healed correctly. It caused a lot of instability in my right knee when I would do any single-leg movement, but because I’m stubborn I was always able to always power through any workout so I never even realized I had an issue to begin with! But as long as you follow these 3 GOLDEN RULES, you will be able to train injury free and keep making GAINS! I also have a bonus tip to help with your overall hamstring activation at the end of the article so make sure you keep reading!

Golden Rule #1 – Mind Your Step!
The most common injury with the Reverse Barbell Lunge occurs when people step too far backwards or not far enough! So let’s quickly go over both.

1. If you step too far backwards, it’s definitely not good because your joints will not be in alignment. Watch what happens when I do it. My back knee is definitely not underneath my pelvis and my front knee is definitely not above my ankle! Now is this BAD enough to cause an injury? Well, it’s not terrible if you do it with bodyweight in your everyday life but when you start add weight on your shoulders, then it becomes a problem. This is because your muscles are not in a mechanically sound position to move the weight, therefore the possibility of a strain or pull is increased drastically! When you have weight on your shoulders you want to feel compact and tight on every rep. Stepping too far back will feel very extremely unstable.

2. Now, what if your back step is too short? Well, again, your joints will not be in alignment and you’re shifting the focus of the exercise from hams and glutes to QUADS by a lot and not in a good way because a lot of the tension will be in your knee. And speaking of the knees, look at the angle. They are bending way more than 90 degrees which heavily recruits the quads but also my front knee is tracking really far over toes.

Your knee tracking past your toes isn’t always really bad, for example when squatting, but in this situation it’s not good because as I just said, we are placing a lot of the stress from the weight directly on the knee.

So, what’s the solution? Before you start barbell reverse lunging, perform some reps with bodyweight first until you figure out what’s the optimal step distance for you. For the most part you want 90 degree bends in both knees and above all else you want to feel STABLE while performing your repetitions.

Golden Rule #2 – Keep Everything In Line
Now, this may same identical to the previous rule but bare with me for a second. In the previous rule, we talked about absolute knee angles and how far you should step back. Now, I want to talk about relative joint positioning in regards to the entire body.

This exercises starts to get problematic when you step back at an angle. This slight step-back to the side creates a lot of torque on the knee and hip joint, especially when you add resistance to the exercise.

Continue reading here:

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