Lower Body Cross Fitness Exercise Tips

Series Summary

Many people want to lose weight, and despite claims for quick fat burning pills and powders, the best way to lose weight is still through proper diet and exercise. Exercise does more than just maintain physical fitness though. Working out can also help build healthy bone density, muscle strength, and joint mobility. It can also reduce your general health risks, boost the immune system, and help with depression and insomnia. Whether your reason for exercising is to lose weight, or improve muscle mass, working out is always a good idea to help promote the health of your body and mind.

In this free video fitness series, our expert will demonstrate how to do a variety of lower body exercises. Having a firm base to stand on is important so building the muscles in your lower body can be crucial. Let our expert give you step-by-step instructions how to do squats, lunges, side and front lunges, and step ups. You will also learn how to do wall squats and dead lifts. If you are interested in getting in shape and building muscles, let our expert teach you this easy to do exercises for the lower body.

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Dr. Garrett Smith for Expert Village. I'm a licensed naturopathic physician. I'm a certified strength and conditioning specialist. I have a degree in exercise physiology. I'm a CrossFit, level II, certified trainer. I've been in the personal training field for over 13 years. I've started two gyms, one of them being my current CrossFit, Tucson and I've also worked in the physical therapy and rehabilitation fields. This next segment of exercises is completely based on functional leg or lower body exercises. We're going to do some that are two feet together. You know, normal, like what people know as a squat. A two legged squat and variations upon that. The next group will be lunges. Lunges are where one leg is ahead of the other. Those are great for building strength in both legs where one's forward and one's back. The last group will be one legged stuff. Stuff that requires more balance and more strength. Because, when you take your whole body weight and put it on one leg, it's twice as much weight on that one leg. We're going to cover squats, lunges, single legs, and do progressions through each one from easier to harder. What we're going to talk about today is functional lower body exercises, also known as leg exercises, and many of these exercises are used in the CrossFit work-outs. We have three major groups of exercises that we're going to do. I specifically picked exercises that don't require a lot of equipment so that anybody can do these at home or any time they wanted to. The first group of exercises is what are typically known as 'squats'. Two feet on the ground, in the same plane, moving our bodies up and down. The next group of exercises requires a bit more balance, it's lunge exercises where one leg is in front of the other so your legs aren't together so there's more side to side balance that's necessary. We also get more strength in the front leg than the back leg in different ways. The last group is one leg exercises or single leg exercises where they require a lot more balance and they also require more strength in general because, when you pick one leg up off the ground, you're taking your whole body weight, plus the weight of that leg you just lifted and making one leg lift all of it. It requires more strength and it definitely requires more balance so you tend to get more benefits out of it. Those are the groups of types of exercises we'll be going over. Squats, lunges, and single leg exercises. "