Personal Health and Fitness

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Dumbbell exercises - lower body

Video 37 of 71
3 min 0 sec
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Now remember, when we load the body with the weights, we need to remember where we load the weights. If you load the weight in front of the body, you have now added more tension on the front. So it is very important now, that if you are doing a lower body movement and you are going down, that you load the weight more onto the heel, to balance the weight out.

Now, first of all what we are going to do is a very simple, shoulder loaded dumbbell, simple box squat. So what you are going to do, you are going to load the dumbbells onto the shoulder to create resistance on the body, it is as simple as that. And then you are going to put yourself into your nice, strong, foundation position for your box squat. So your heels are anchored to the floor, your toes are relaxed and your weight is balanced on both feet. Then you are going to lower your weight down to your 90 degrees and extend the leg back to that nice upright position, with a nice proud chest and making sure your eye line stays nice and relaxed.

My second dumbbell movement for lower body is a lateral lunge. Now remember, with the weight additionally on the body, you are going to put more tension onto the muscles. So all you are doing is adding more weight to the body to make the muscles work harder. You are going to stand upright with the weight between the legs, down between the centre of the body. And then what you are going to do is you are going to keep your left leg straight and step out laterally to the side of the body with your right foot. As you extend the right leg, the left leg stays straight and you shift the weight over to the right-hand side, but bending the right leg in the process. As you do that, you will get a nice stretch all the way down the inside, through the groin, okay. And the quad muscle on the right-hand side is going to have to push down through the floor to get you back to that upright position, creating tension in the quad and the hamstring and the glutes.

So the third movement I am going to cover now is the dumbbell swing. It is a very simple movement. It is very similar to what we do with the kettle bell, okay. But all we do simply, is we bring the dumbbells together as a fixed point in the middle of the body. What we do is we hinge the body, we push the hips back and we push the chest out nice and proud, we keep a nice straight back and we simply push the hips forwards. As we push the hips forwards, the pendulum of the body will throw the weight up away from the body into a 3 o'clock position. From there, gravity will bring it back down to the bottom and you just keep that process going. That is known as a dumbbell swing. Dumbbell swing is particularly good for activating the glutes, because it is the glutes that are responsible for thrusting the hips forwards.