Are walking lunges a good exercise for building the quads?

Lunges are in my opinion one of the most underrated exercises out there!

Squats and deadlifts are incredibly effective, don't get me wrong, but lunges are also fantastic.

The first thing that I like about them is that they are unilateral, if you have muscular imbalances, you can use lunges to correct them.

Start your set with the weaker leg and stop when this same leg can not match the performance of the other one.

The goal is to make sure that you put do not allow the stronger leg to do most of the work.

The other thing that I love about lunges is the fact that you can modify the form based on your goals.

The quadriceps are responsible for knee extension and the glutes are responsible for hip extension.

I purposefully did not include the other functions of those muscle groups because they are not relevant to lunges.

If you want to work more the quads, you need to make sure that most of the movement occurs at the knees.

The opposite is true if you want to work more the glutes, in this case, most of the movement should occur at the hips.

To make sure that your quads are really active, keep your torso as upright as possible and take small strides.

The exercise is then going to look like a front squat with a staggered stance!

To turn lunges into a glute builder, take long strides and allow your knees to go as far as possible over your toes.

The more mobility you have in your ankles, the deeper you will be able to go and the more you will stretch your glutes at the bottom.

As a result of your knees going as far as possible over your toes, you are going to experience a lot of hip flexion at the bottom and a lot of hip extension to get out of this position.

Finally, the last thing that I like about lunges is the fact that you do not use the same training modalities as for squats and deadlifts.

When you do those two exercises, you usually use heavy weights and do low or moderate-rep sets.

Lunges are usually done with lower weights and higher reps allowing you to get another type of stimulus on your legs!