The Best Exercises You Could Ever Do: Lateral Lunge & Overhead Driver

While this may be the longest blog title in the known universe, it belies a fantastically great exercise that I’ve recently started using on myself as a mobilizer and warmup for deadlifting. That plus it is amazingly fun to throw down, and give to clients that think they’re all hot shit and stuff.

What it does:

Stretches your hips through the frontal plane, specifically stretching the adductor and groin isolaterally. This locks the pelvis in place so that the lumbar spine can’t go through flexion or extension without you falling on your butt, so when you perform the arm driver you can work on getting full T-spine extension. This is a good thing, and as Mike Boyle points out in Advances in Functional Training:

The important thing about t-spine mobility is almost no one has enough and it’s hard to get too much

What to do:

Lunge to the side, keeping your static leg straight and locked out, while squatting on your lead leg until your calves touch your hamstrings, or as close as possible. Once at the bottom, hold your hands together with straight elbows and drive your arms overhead in a nice big arc, trying to get full overhead movement. repeat ad nauseum.

How bad-ass is this??

On a 1 to 10 scale, this would probably rate about an 18, maybe even a 19. Just throwing that out there. To put it another way, your thumbs up gives a thumbs up for this one.