reckonerWalking lunge
Step forward, drop the back knee, stand up onto the front leg, then walk into the next one. Every rep is a controlled landing on one leg, which is why this feels harder than the same weight held still and why a side that is weaker cannot borrow from the other.
Drop the back knee, front shin tall.
- Pattern
- Lunge
- Trains
- Quads, glutes, adductors
- Kit
- Dumbbell
- Loading
- A weight you choose
- Reckoner prescribes
- 4 sets of 6 to 10 reps at RPE 8
- Progression step
- 2 kg once the top of the range is clean
- Skill
- Technical
- Recovery cost
- High
- Not prescribed if you have declared
- Knee, hip
Muscles worked
How to do it
Stand tall with a dumbbell in each hand
Arms hanging, shoulders back, chest up. Look at a fixed point ahead of you. Your balance follows your eyes and a lunge is a balance exercise before it is a leg one.
Step forward and land flat
A long step, straight ahead, landing on the whole foot rather than the heel or the toe. Land where you can stop, not where momentum takes you.
Drop the back knee, front shin tall
That is the cue on your wrist. The back knee comes down toward the floor and the front shin stays close to vertical. Both knees finish at about a right angle.
Stand up on the front leg and walk on
Drive through the front heel, bring the back foot through, and step straight into the next rep. The back leg is balance, not a launcher.
What goes wrong
Stepping too short
A short step drives the front knee a long way forward and turns the lunge into a knee exercise you cannot get depth on. It also makes the back knee hit the floor before your front leg has done anything. If the front shin is falling forward, step further.
Letting the dumbbells swing you
Momentum from the arms will carry you into and out of a rep, and it makes a heavy set feel possible right up until you land badly. If the weights are swinging, the load is above your control rather than above your strength.
Assuming this is a quad exercise only
The library records quads first, and the glutes are doing a great deal too. In a systematic review of gluteus maximus activation, the traditional lunge cleared the review's very high threshold of 60 per cent of a maximal contraction1. If your glutes are sore after these, nothing has gone wrong.
How Reckoner progresses this lift
Six weeks of this lift, from 16 kg, run through the real engine. Nothing below was typed in: the prescription, the decision and the sentence beside it all come from the same code that writes your week.
| Week | Prescribed | What it did |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 4 x 6 at 16 kg | More reps 6 → 7 repsYou finished every set at RPE 7, with room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
| 2 | 4 x 7 at 16 kg | More reps 7 → 8 repsYou finished every set at RPE 7, with room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
| 3 | 4 x 8 at 16 kg | More reps 8 → 9 repsYou finished every set at RPE 7, with room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
| 4 | 4 x 9 at 16 kg | More reps 9 → 10 repsYou finished every set at RPE 7, with room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
| 5 | 4 x 10 at 16 kg | Deload 40% of sets offFive weeks of building, then one week lighter. About 40% of the sets come off. The load holds and your reps stay where you earned them, so you keep the strength and lose the fatigue. |
| 6 | 2 x 10 at 16 kg | Load up 16 kg → 18 kgYou hit the top of the range at RPE 7, so the bar goes up 2 kg to 18 kg and reps reset to six. The lighter week is over, so this is back to four sets. |
Real engine output, not an illustration. Every row was produced by running the engine itself when this page was generated.
The full rule, and why the reps move before the load does, is in how Reckoner decides to add weight.
Questions people ask
How do I count a set of walking lunges?
Count total steps or count steps per leg, and then never change which. Both are defensible and they differ by a factor of two, so a block where you switched counting halfway is a block whose numbers do not mean anything.
Walking lunge or reverse lunge?
The reverse lunge is the more controllable of the two and it lets you keep your feet in one place. The walking lunge adds a landing and a stride, so it asks more of your balance for the same load. Both are in the library with their own records.
Will Reckoner give me this with a knee restriction?
No. Knee and hip are both recorded against it. Declare either in setup and it comes out of your plan.
Similar movements
Reckoner eases the load first when this lift stalls, and offers one of these only if it stalls again after that. A lift already as light as your kit goes has no load left to ease, so the offer comes straight away. Each of them has a page.
Sources
- Krause Neto and colleagues, Journal of Sports Science and Medicine, 2020. Gluteus Maximus Activation during Common Strength and Hypertrophy Exercises: A Systematic Review a systematic review of sixteen studies reporting gluteus maximus activation as a share of maximal voluntary contraction, in which the step-up and its variations sat at the top of the list and the split squat, the lunge, the hip thrust variations and the conventional deadlift all cleared the review's very high threshold of 60 per cent