Hey, good-looking.
Hey.
I'm bold.
I want to do things.
I have a new idea.
Let's do some lunges.
Get down on those butts.
Get it hard.
Get it squeezy.
Well, hot dog, that triggers my negativity because I've got bad knees.
So you can do it.
I will just be dejected and not good enough.
There's no such thing as bad knees.
Mine are, and I will stay defensive and whiny.
New idea.
There's no such thing as bad knees.
I have decided that I have bad knees, and I am closed on the subject.
I'm going to argue and upset you.
I am upset.
My knees hurt when I try to exercise.
You're having a mid-knee crisis.
You need some counseling.
I need love, kindness, and support.
Do you think I want bad knees?
Okay.
I'm going to shift to loving you and start with a hug.
If you are willing, I can show you how to take it out of your knees.
It's not supposed to be in your knees.
I am comforted by your love.
I'm not enthusiastic because I'm scared, but I am willing.
Okay.
So, there's no such thing as bad knees, right?
And you're thinking, okay, so why do they hurt?
Well, I'll tell you, but you got to listen, and you got to trust me.
Okay.
I'm going to stay quiet.
You're very charismatic, and I am listening reluctantly.
Unless your knees were dramatically hurt in a specific event like a car wreck, or someone
whacked you with a sledgehammer, then the diagnosis has to be.
There's a weakness in the muscles above the knee or below the knee.
There's a solution for that.
You see, when your muscles above the knee or below the knee are too weak to absorb your
total body weight as you live day to day, the work of moving you around and getting
you up and down falls into the knees and wears them out.
There's nothing wrong with the knee.
It's the muscles that are too weak.
Muscles get weaker every week that you do not practice strength exercises.
Over time, even what we call normal gait patterns are mutated so badly that we don't move like
we used to, and what really wears out those knees.
Add to that our brains forget how to move or control our muscles normally.
So we just slowly, gradually deteriorate everything.
Unrestricted movements are a thing of the past.
Motor control, which is one of the best features of the brain, weakens just like everything
else if we do not practice strength exercises.
We just toggle around and create more problems.
That pain that you feel is the red flag of muscular weakness.
Well, then show me, show me something, mister.
I will.
Let's go to the gym.
Let's go.
Hello, I am Laurence.
And I'm Jennifer.
And we are The Personal Training Show.
Today we're going to show you how to do lunges.
Lunges are a very valuable exercise if you know how to do them.
The first thing I'll say is it was quite some time ago that forward lunges became popular,
particularly amongst personal trainers.
So you would see people doing them all the time if they were in a personal training session.
So I don't know how they got started, and I can only guess how they got popular because
you do what your personal trainer says.
But they are not good.
And the reason they are not good, I'll just briefly show you, and then we'll move into
backward lunges, which are better.
Forward lunges, when you do them, you temporarily put your weight in your knee, okay?
Now you're supposed to land and put it in the rear end, okay?
But, well, you do do that better and better if you have perfect technique.
But I guarantee you people don't have perfect technique for that, plus walking lunges means
each single one you have to have perfect technique.
And plus you have to be really, really coordinatedly strong.
You have to have a very, very developed and polished motor skill and musculature.
You need to be an all-around exerciser to get away with that.
It's just not worth it.
First of all, I don't ever see anybody do it well, okay?
And the personal trainers, for the most part, are just standing there watching.
That's another issue.
Anyway, so we're going to do backward lunges.
Go ahead and get in your backward lunge position near your feet or just together, I guess.
Okay, excellent.
Go ahead and start.
Let's see how you do.
Excellent.
That is very, very good.
So the work is going in this hip.
You feel it?
Yes, right here.
Good.
Keep your hand there so we can see where it's supposed to go.
Now the knee of that hip where she's got her hand, that knee is blocked back so that it
never goes forward of her toes, okay?
I don't think that we can see that real well on the camera.
So yeah, stand so that you're profiled to the camera.
That's not profiled to the camera, better, okay?
Oh, now that's how we're going to do it, okay?
Forget the fact that our nine-foot power rack is not on the right angle.
We will move.
That looks good.
Okay?
Go ahead and switch the legs.
Show me the other one.
All right, now, okay, I'll tell you what.
Let's see how adaptable we are.
Just you turn around and do that same hip.
So you're going to turn around and profile yourself to the camera, profile yourself to
the camera.
Good.
This is live performance art.
Open mic, unscripted, unlike our knee skit.
I hope you all liked our knee skit.
I did.
I did too.
I love Jennifer's knees, so it's easy to get in character.
Well, you're the bee's knees to me, baby.
How about a kiss?
Okay, I got an idea.
Why don't you talk about them, anything you have to say, and I'll do some.
That's a great idea.
Okay, this bar is an Olympic bar.
You learned that from overhead press girl.
We have put it, we've adjusted the hooks on the rack so that it's like a ballet bar.
I love ballet bars.
I'm going to tell you something I've learned by spending years and years both in the gym
and in the studio.
You know this place is called gym studio, right, for a reason.
That regardless of whether it's a horizontal bar, like a ballet bar and like this one,
or whether it's a vertical bar, okay, like in the power rack.
Power rack was my first piece of equipment that I fell in love with.
It was the highlight of my 1976 year.
But it doesn't matter whether it's horizontal or it's vertical.
You can hold on to it, okay?
And that stabilizes you while you're doing some kind of precarious movement, all righty?
So both are good, horizontal and vertical.
Let's see.
Now if I'm profiled to the camera, that one would go back.
This is my working hip, okay?
My working hip, you can use this leg just so that you don't weigh as much as you lower
in that hip.
And see that knee?
That knee is all, I'm going to let it go forward enough that the kneecap is right over those
toes or toenails, okay?
And I'm going to imagine that it can't go any further forward than that.
I'm going to block it back.
It's a term that we use in gymnastics to teach standing back handsprings instead of a round
off back handspring where you run down the mat and then change your direction from running
forward to all of a sudden backwards via a round off.
And then you throw for a back handspring in the round off, I guess, and then throw your
arms.
But a standing back handspring, you can't jump backwards far enough to do a standing
back handspring if you let your knees go forward of your knees.
If you let your knees go forward of your toes.
So that's called blocking your knees back.
So I'm going to block my knees back and sit.
Very good.
Stand with that hip, thank you.
You can see that your knees and this imaginary plane is not going in front of the toes.
Just like you said, you're holding it very well.
Okay, it takes a while for this hip to absorb the work, sit, sit, feel, feel, feel, stand,
stand, stand.
Okay, I'll show you my other side.
I want to show off how adaptable I am.
Did you know that humans are the most adaptable species?
That's why we're the highest on the food chain.
You're profiling the camera very well.
Thank you.
It's not easy, you know.
Good, I can tell by the way your rear leg comes up off the ground that you're keeping
the work in that hip.
Okay, now I want to show you where we normally do them.
We have tons of clients that do them this way.
So we lead and guide them with love and patience until they feel that it's not in their knees.
When they first begin, we tell them to just put this foot back here, okay, and just curtsy.
Just, you know, you distribute your body weight in every muscle you have.
That way nothing works too hard.
And you learn to keep your hips right between your two feet, your front foot, your back
foot, and you just lower, lower, lower, lower, lower, lower.
In the beginning, only your knees will feel it.
So keep after it until the musculature around the hip, okay?
Just as an illustrator, let's say I have a highlighter, and I'm just marking this big
circle, you know, it's like a 12-inch diameter around where I picture the hip joint to be.
That's where you want to feel it.
That is also called the gluteal region, okay?
So if you want a good-looking butt and good-looking legs, you can't really get good-looking legs
without starting with a good-looking butt.
So you might as well start with a good-looking butt.
So I'm on the ball of that back foot, flat foot here, and then I look and I see that
my hips are halfway between both feet, okay?
Right now I'm towards the front foot, right now I'm towards the back foot.
I take a moment and center myself, and then you want to relax both knees, back knee, front
knee, as you lower, lower, okay?
Now I can pull myself up to help me try to do it with that hip.
I can also push off the ball of that back foot while I'm trying to take it out of the
knees.
The strain is what you're taking out of the knees.
Your weight is what you're taking out of the knees.
So I can just pull myself up, lower, lower, lower, lower, pull myself up.
And with very relatively slow and consistent practice, you're only going to do approximately
10 reps and then you take a break, okay?
Somebody else's turn.
You can get that.
If you don't get this, you're not going to be able to do any other hip exercise, okay?
The very, very best strength exercise as well.
So you might as well practice with one hip at a time till you get that.
And then there's just, there's a million wonderful lunges where I'm stretching everything that
needs to be stretched and using everything that needs to be used so that it doesn't deteriorate,
so that I don't wear out, okay?
Let's watch Jennifer do some more.
Excellent.
I've got a few tips for beginners.
This ballet bar can be emulated at home by using a kitchen counter, which is approximately
the same height.
So you just stand in front of it, place those hands comfortably.
And just like Warren said, to start, you don't have to take the giant leap back.
You just take, you know, one step back that's comfortable.
And just like we teach on squats, it's a sitting exercise.
So you fold at the hip and practice coming down where you can feel that you're sitting
and standing in the hip that you have in front.
So just go down a little bit and come back up as you develop your confidence.
Then as you get a little bit more confident, you can go a little bit lower, you can put
that foot a little farther back, and go as far down as you like, and make sure to do
both sides.
In our single legs video, you hear me talking about the importance of strengthening each
hip individually.
We don't want to develop a weakness on one side.
We don't want one hip to be weaker than the other.
So it's important to do exercises like Backward Lunges to put each hip responsible for its
own workload, help you develop evenly.
What do you think?
I think I love your knees.
I love yours.
Okay, that's it for this show.
You have to be brave, and you have to have courage, and you have to have patience.
Those things aren't really easy to do because when you don't want to, when you don't want
to exercise, when you don't want to do strength type stuff, it's really your body that doesn't
want to do it.
It's so weak that it's talking through you.
It comes right out through your brain and your mouth.
It's just a reluctance, it's a fear.
So you do have to be courageous and get started and try and find somebody that looks like
they know what they're doing and ask them, that's where to start.
Patience, patience, patience, it's the opposite of ADD.
So patience, patience, patience.
See you soon.
Bye.
