Gold’s Gym Douglasville Enewsletter

Lunges are an exceptional exercise for conditioning a mom’s lower body. They stress the muscles from a perfect angle to develop beautiful shape and symmetry in your legs, thighs and butt.

Because they require balance, lunges also build nueromuscular and functional capacity - helping your body go through it’s daily motions and let you pick up your children with ease.

Whether you’re caring for a child, trying to lose weight, want to look sleeker in shorts or improve your athletic performance, lunges should be part of your training program.

The Ultimate Lunge is the Reverse Lunge
There are many types of lunges. In my opinion, the best is the reverse lunge. here’s why:

- Because you have more balance and support, it’s easy to learn and perform. Plus you have less momentum to contend with during the exercise which provides more effective stress to the muscles and yields better results.

- It’s safer and softer on your knees because your back foot absorbs the ballistic shock of the lunge step. (Contrasted to the front lunge where impact shock can transfer to the knee even if you land heel to toe.)

- It creates muscular balance by initiating the movement backward as opposed to most other exercise movement patterns that take you forward and bias your musculature toward forward motion.

How To Do A Reverse Lunge Correctly
- Start facing forward feet shoulder width apart arms at your side.

- Step back with one leg far enough to allow your knees to bend at 90 degree angles. You can simultaneously bring your arms up to act as a slight counter balance. If you want a greater challenge, hold light weights in your hands.

Reverse Lunge - You’re in correct position at the bottom of your lunge when your front knee is directly over the ankle. (See picture)

IMPORTANT - To go back to the start position, start dropping your arms and lift from the heel of your front leg. DO NOT PUSH OFF YOUR BACK LEG. This simple advice will dramatically improve the effectiveness of your reverse lunge, give you a butt I can bounce a quarter off of and get you much better results in half the time.

Try doing reverse lunges 3 times-a-week on non-consecutive days. Work up to 2 sets of 10 repetitions on each leg. After a month I think you’ll be amazed at the impact the reverse lunge will have on your physique.

Exercise boosts brainpower by building new brain cells in a brain region linked with memory and memory loss, U.S. researchers reported Monday.Tests on mice showed they grew new brain cells in a brain region called the dentate gyrus, a part of the hippocampus that is known to be affected in the age-related memory decline that begins around age 30 for most humans.

The researchers used magnetic resonance imaging scans to help document the process in mice — and then used MRIs to look at the brains of people before and after exercise.

They found the same patterns, which suggests that people also grow new brain cells when they exercise.

“No previous research has systematically examined the different regions of the hippocampus and identified which region is most affected by exercise,” Dr. Scott Small, a neurologist at Columbia University Medical Center in New York who led the study, said in a statement.

Writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers said they first tested mice.

Brain expert Fred Gage, of the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, had shown that exercise can cause the development of new brain cells in the mouse equivalent of the dentate gyrus.

The teams worked together to find a way to measure this using MRI, by tracking cerebral blood volume.

“Once these findings were established in mice, we were interested in determining how exercise affects the hippocampal cerebral blood volume maps of humans,” they wrote.

They of course could not dissect the brains of people to see if new neurons grew, but they could use MRI to have a peek.

They recruited 11 healthy adults and made them undergo a three-month aerobic exercise regimen.

They did MRIs of their brains before and after. They also measured the fitness of each volunteer by measuring oxygen volume before and after the training program.

Exercise generated blood flow to the dentate gyrus of the people, and the more fit a person got, the more blood flow the MRI detected, the researchers found.

“The remarkable similarities between the exercise-induced cerebral blood volume changes in the hippocampal formation of mice and humans suggest that the effect is mediated by similar mechanisms,” they wrote.

“Our next step is to identify the exercise regimen that is most beneficial to improve cognition and reduce normal memory loss, so that physicians may be able to prescribe specific types of exercise to improve memory,” Small said.