Yesterday during one of my training sessions, I had the athletes perform walking lunges. The walking lunge is great for the development of the hips and legs. As I watched my athletes move through this exercise I discovered a few new things…

It is common knowledge that the walking lunge will become more difficult for those with tight hip flexors and ankle dorsi-flexion. These two areas of the body will become focal points if lack of motion is present. What the commonalities I saw between other exercises regarding the hips really stuck out.

As part of our warm up routines, I have the athletes perform a lot of hip circuits, balance with leg and arm reaches and lunge circuits. The goal is to prepare the athlete in all planes of movement. I have one athlete in particular that doesn’t like to load his hips. He pulls is hips under hip when doing balance exercises and reaching. No surprise, he doesn’t like to use the counter-balance action of the hips. Therefore, he is more quad dominant. At this training session I assigned rotational medicine ball throw exercise to teach the kids how to load and explode off the back hip. During this exercise this same athlete didn’t want to load the hip. When all the athletes did the walking lunge he took short awkward steps in the walking lunge.  All the initial exercises we did lead up to the walking lunge looking the way it did.

The funny thing about this particular athlete is during his assessment he had great movement. He scored well on the FMS and had no real mobility or stability issues. He has no major asymmetries and he is actually a pretty explosive athlete.

The only real explanation I have is he has developed a pattern and it has been ingrained. I say this because during all of the previous exercises throughout the workout when he didn’t load his hip(s) properly, I corrected him and he was able to do it correctly…but only for a short time. He immediately went back to his learned pattern. As you can imagine, each time I introduced a different exercise/skill his initial movement is to load the quads first and keep the hips under his body and not “stick his butt back”.

When it was time to teach the walking lunge my curiosity was at a high with this athlete. I wanted to see his compensation pattern for an exercise that normally requires the hips to load along with the quads. I wanted to see if he would take a longer stride naturally to load the hips more or if he would shorten his stride to load the quads more. He did exactly that. His stride was so short that his front leg heel would come off the ground and his knee would drive way forward of the foot. I immediately corrected him and he was fine….until the next set.

Even though this post is about the walking lunge and how it helps with multi-directional speed, the real purpose of this post is how patterns can be traced. I was able to trace his movement patterns from the warm ups through, medicine ball throws, to change of direction speed skills and finally in the walking lunge.

He is capable of performing it correctly; however he just needs more reps (performed correctly) to influence the new patterns of movement

The next time you have an athlete exhibiting less than optimal movement watch and see how many different exercises are influenced by this pattern. Because I saw this athlete show the same type of movement in all the different planes and combination of planes I was able to see I was dealing with a motor program issue. Especially because he has no pain, his assessments showed little if any restrictions that would indicate guarding of a muscle or joint. Plus he was able to do it when I showed him. It is just time for us to roll our sleeves up and get him working on the correct movements each time.

P.S. – Low Box Training for Athletes video has many exercises that would be perfect to help this athlete regain proper hip communication with the rest of the body. If you haven’t seen this video yet, go to www.LowBoxTraining.com and check it out.

P.S.S. – The Speed Guy is now Tweeting…check me out http://www.twitter.com/leetaft