A curtsy is a traditional gendered gesture of greeting, in which a girl or woman bends her knees while bowing her head. You may have never greeted nor been greeted with a curtsy, but chances are you’ve seen the curtsy lunge. The curtsy lunge is an effective and versatile lunge variation that stimulates and targets your glutes, quads, and hamstrings. Learn the curtsy lunge benefits, the muscles they work, and how to do them properly.
What Is Curtsy Lunge
Curtsy lunge is a compound functional strength movement, that targets your glutes, quads, and hamstrings. As opposed to the traditional lunge, the curtsy lunge targets the inner thighs along with your glute medius, and minimus.
Curtsy Lunge Muscles Worked
Curtsy lunge is an effective and versatile addition to your lower body routine. It targets a slightly different area of your backside than the traditional lunge. It focuses on your inner thighs, gluteus medius, and gluteus minimus which helps improve your posture and stabilize your hips. Curtsy lunge is a compound movement, which means that it stimulates multiple muscles groups at one time, in addition to joints, and stabilizing muscles such as your core, hips, and ankles. The glute medius is an often neglected area of your backside, making the curtsy lunge a great variation to help increase strength and size.
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Curtsy Lunge Benefits
1. Strength And Muscle Mass
Curtsy lunge benefits strength and building more lean muscle mass. The lunge is a compound functional strength movement, stimulating multiple muscle groups, joints, and stabilizers to help build more strength and size in your lower body and core. Adding the curtsy lunge to your lower body routine, can help improve your functional movement and performance across multiple lifts and training modalities.
2. Sculpted Booty
The curtsy lunge targets the glutes, specifically the glute minimus, medius and inner thighs. Adding the curtsy lunge to your leg day train split can greatly benefit and help you build bigger, fuller, and stronger glutes. With stronger glutes you’ll also be able to push more weight, lift heavier and increase raw power and strength.
3. Body Optimization
The curtsy lunge is a resistance and strength training movement. The thermic effect of exercise or any type of training will ultimately help you burn more calories. However, the best training mode to increase thermogenesis, is resistance training.
The more muscle mass you have, the more calories you burn at rest. Strength training will help build more muscle mass, therefore burning more calories at rest, boosting your metabolic rate, aka increasing your body’s thermic effect. Resting muscle tissue burns 6kcal/lb per day at rest, thus the more muscle you have, the more calories you burn.
Post workout your metabolism stays elevated through a process called excess post-exercise oxygen consumption (EPOC). EPOC also known as the after-burn effect, refers to the oxygen and energy (in calories) it takes for your body to repair your muscle tissue during recovery. EPOC can be a major contributor to your total daily caloric expenditure by increasing your body’s thermic effect [R]. Prolonged workouts with more intense resistance training at heavier weights have been associated with a more substantial EPOC [R].
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How to Curtsy Lunge
Stand with you feet shoulder width apart, and arms in a neutral position at your sides
Shift your weight to your right foot and take a step back with your left foot as if you are curtsying, bracing you core, chest high, and bringing your arms up parallel
Cross your right foot behind your left, bend you knees, and lower your hips until your left thigh is nearly parallel to the ground.
Keep your torso upright and square as possible, keeping your shins in place and directly in front of you.
Return to start and repeat on the other side
Curtsy Lunge: Takeaway
Curtsy lunge is the perfect exercise to add to your leg day training split. Curtsy lunge targets specific glute muscles and your inner thighs to help build a stronger lower body and add more lean muscle mass. Not only will you build a bigger backside, curtsy lunge will help you in every aspect of your performance, with increased power, speed, and force to lift heavier loads and more volume.
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