THE HEALTHIEST EXERCISE EVER

YO, one of the most POWERFUL— HYPERTROPHIC— HEALTHIEST EXERCISE EVER is also the most dreaded, neglected, and underestimated in our arsenal to build strength, power, and size they are them WALKING LUNGES, MY BOYE!

The list of overall benefits surpasses basically ANY OTHER LIFT, and most importantly in positions that are realistically FUNCTIONAL— YUCK, I hate using this word, but aye, it’s appropriate in this context, ‘cause check this out:

• It’ll improve your hip, knee, and ankle mobility.

• It’ll stretch your glutes and hamstrings.

• It’ll improve one of the most neglected factors for HEALTH, in particular as we develop past a handful of dozen summers, and also for sheer athletic ability, which is BALANCE.

• Go heavy enough and all those aforementioned goodies will provide you with uncanny stability for heavyass compound lifts like overhead presses, squats, and deadlifts.

• Do them for enough reps, and sure as hell you’ll build as much lower body muscles as any other lift can provide you, YES, it’s even more potent than squats.

Don’t trust me? Test it yourself.

At this very moment, do 30 steps of walking lunges, and just BEHOLD as your ass will get LIT THE FUCK UP for the next 2 days, JUST WITH BODY WEIGHT.

Lunges are absolutely AS LEGIT AS IT GETS, and people hardly even do them because they're HARD TO DO.

Not inherently hard to do, it’s hard to do because most of us suffer from CHRONIC WEAKNESS in key areas of this movement pattern.

When your ankle and hip mobility are all wonky due to an overabundance of sitting, executing a proper lunge feels odd and unstable— you can rest assured that you’ll start hearing all sorts of clicks and pops on those knees of yours as soon as you start doing them but don’t be discouraged, ‘cause if that’s your case, that’s enough reason to start incorporating them into your routine at this very moment.

They require 20% of the overload required by a squat to generate even greater results for overall lower body hypertrophy because you’re not going to be limited by your lower back to express full strength with your legs.

Personally, even though I’m low-bar squatting with 440+ solid-ass pounds (YEAH BUDDY!)—which emphasizes glutes and hammies— with 2 25lbs dumbbells in each hand, 30 steps of walking lunges would absolutely TORCH the posterior portion of my lower body, and by stepping into a lunge, and making my front leg work extra hard as I went up, even my quads would get a gnarly pump.

If you’re a bit of a maniac, superset them with leg extensions and MY, OH, MY, the pump is absolutely GLORIOUS!

They also put a GIANT stretch on the glutes— THAT MEAT CUSHION, MY BOYE— and even using only bodyweight that stretch will go alongside a great deal of tension, which is UNCANNY for hypertrophy.

They reinforce the entirety of the real estate in the upward portion of the knee joint since the pushing happens with a single leg at a time, developing the vastus medialis — the TEARDROP muscle on the front part of your leg that just gives your legs a great athletic look.

But most importantly all that jazz is improving your knee health TREMENDOUSLY.

They're decompressing the hip socket while stretching the glute and the hip flexor simultaneously, improving hip & lower back health.

They're outstanding for athletic ability, building balance, and coordination.

Think of a stride in a sprint, a powerful straight punch, a throw, or just flying upwards with your knees pointing straight to a motherfucker’s face— everything that requires EXPLOSIVE kinetic force to be generated starts with your legs in a lunge position, so it's absolutely extraordinary for specific building high quality adaptations in that position.

They only lose to squats in the absolute-strength-building capacity because less weight equals less axial loading of the spine, hence less CNS stimulation, and hence less motor unit recruitment— remember, expressing strength is a NEUROLOGICAL ADAPTATION, that’s the real key to why deadlifts and squats give you so much strength, they force all the real state in your spinal chord to sound the alarms and recruit every single muscle fiber required to keep that spine upwards and out of harms way.

But the solution is simple, DO BOTH SQUATS AND LUNGES.

Build the strongest most resilient legs you can, and become DEADLY.

LEGS ARE DANGEROUS, MY BRUDDAH!

Big KISS

THE POTATO MAN