Single leg exercises suck. There’s no two ways about it. They’re awkward, clunky and leave you gasping for air AND unable to climb stairs for days at a time.
But exercises like lunges, split squats and 1-leg RDLs have their place in many programs as a way to keep the hips and lower back happy and healthy.
And I know that technically some of the exercises we’ll discuss aren’t single leg exercises, but rather just unilateral lower body movements. I don’t care. I’m calling them single leg because it doesn’t really matter.
Recently, I’ve found that for many lifters, using a coiled stance for knee-dominant single leg exercises and a crossbody reach for hip-dominant ones makes the movements feel smoother, easier to learn and overall less of a pain in the ass.
This is because the old way of coaching single leg exercises, predominantly in the sagittal plane (front to back), is perhaps not the best way from a learning curve perspective or a joint-friendly perspective. I certainly know that when I was coming up through the coaching ranks, allowing one’s weight to shift side-to-side or one’s hips to rotate even the slightest bit during any of these movements way highly frowned upon.
But if we think more critically about what we’re trying to accomplish by doing these movements, the answer becomes clear.
Why Do Single Leg Exercises in the First Place?
If you’re a team sport athlete, unilateral training is a no brainer. Sprinting, jumping, cutting and throwing are all unilateral in nature and training accordingly will build strength, power and coordination in these positions. But what if you’re a powerlifter? If you end up on one leg at a time at a meet, you’re in deep shit, right?
Specificity aside, I believe there’s a time and place for non-specific training in order to improve one’s longevity as a lifter. There’s a cost of doing business when it comes to getting as strong as humanly possible, often in terms of a reduction in movement quality. That’s a subjective measure at best, but it’s easy to observe how lifting maximal weights over the shortest possible distance in a bilateral, axially-loaded stance over and over can rob us of baseline levels of motion at certain joints like our hips, shoulders and spine.
Simply doing unilateral exercises won’t save you. It’s in the execution.
So when I really sat down and thought about it, here’s why I want my lifters doing single-leg exercises:
- Increase hip internal rotation
- Increase hip adduction
- Teach the obliques, adductors and hamstrings or hip flexors (for hip-dominant and knee-dominant exercises, respectively) to contract together to stabilize the hip
Heavy bilateral lower body exercises like squats and deadlifts place a huge demand on the spinal extensors (upper and lower back) and the hip extensors and external rotators (glutes, TFL). This can also reduce our ability to efficiency flex, internally rotate and abduct the hips, which can lead to hip, lower back and knee pain.
We’re definitely not going to increase competition-specific lower body strength with single leg exercises. They’re not heavy enough. And we probably won’t build much muscle either. They require too much coordination to make the target muscle groups fail before we fall on our ass. So why not bias their execution toward what we’re trying to accomplish: better motion at the hips?
Twist and Shout
Changing the position of where we hold the weight helps shift our center of mass to better recruit the obliques, adductors and hips, depending on whether we’re doing hip-dominant or knee-dominant exercises. A subtle reach across the body can make all the difference.
For all of these exercises, think nose over toes. Your head should stay over the middle of your front foot as much possible. This will put your front hip in a position of internal rotation and adduction, recruiting often-underutilized muscles and preserving precious hip range of motion.
Knee-Dominant: Coiled Stance
For split squats and lunges, use a coiled stance. That is, hold the weight over the outside of the front hip. A goblet position works best here. Careful not to twist too much, just move the weight outside the hip and keep nose over toes.
Hip-Dominant: Crossbody Reach
For 1-leg RDLs, a crossbody reach does the trick. So if you’re standing on your left leg, you’d reach with your right arm to the outside of your left hip and vice versa. I like either holding a plate with both hands or a kettlebell with one hand.
When and Where
I like programming these exercises in a lifter’s warm-up. They’re designed to improve motion at the hip that’s necessary for deep squats, so I’m a big fan of doing these before a heavy squat day. Do 2-3 sets of 6-10 reps per side with a light weight to get the hips ready to go.
You could also perform these after your main lower body movement as accessory exercises. Remember, you’re not going to build a ton of strength or muscle, but as you get better at these movements, you could potentially load them heavy enough to warrant placing them within a training session and not just the warm-up.
