So I’ve always been more of an upper body kind of guy in the gym. Sure I did cardio and some other scattered exercises that worked my lower body, but it was all about beach muscle physique for me. Besides, I had always played soccer, skied, biked, ran track, whatever it may have been and my legs always stayed pretty strong and in shape. Now I’m not saying I’m going to become a lower body freak, because I’ve really stepped up my cardio game and I do a bunch of leg exercises as is, but on my full body days I’m gunna toss in a couple new exercises, one of which I want to talk about now.

This is actually a lunge variation which one of my buddies suggested and it sounded pretty good. He had only rave reviews about it, and said it really helped him put on a lot of lean muscle mass, so here we go….

The first thing your going to want to do is grab some form of straight bar that you can hold above over your head. My gym just happens to have a couple sets of straight curl bars, so for starters I grabbed the 40lb bar. I used a pretty wide grip on the bar, lifted it straight up and locked out my elbows. From there I did three sets of front lunges, alternating legs each rep.

End result was good, you’ll find your arms start to sink down if you don’t pay attention, so try to keep those elbows locked. You definitely feel the burn in your shoulders, and just having to balance the weight up there uses your core muscles as well. I enjoyed it and will continue to do it, probably once or twice a week. For me, the 40lb bar was decent, I definitely could’ve gone higher, but for the first time I wanted to keep it on the lighter side.

Just a side note, instead of holding the bar above your head the entire time, you can press the weight. Bring the bar down as you lunge forward and then explode up with it as you come out of your lunge. I just prefer keeping it extended the entire time becuase I felt the burn in my shoulders a whole lot more.

That’s all I got for now, try it out, let me know what you think. I know fast results are hard to come by in this game, but I’ll keep you posted on any changes or effects from this exercise.