You don’t have to do more traditional lifts to work your leg muscles. Find out what specific and general benefits curtsy lunges offer.
One thing to note before going into the positives is that some people will also find curtsy lunges too uncomfortable in their knees.
In that case, you likely want to choose more standard curtsy lunge alternatives.
1. Curtsy lunges can help grow and strengthen muscles
Curtsy lunges work your mobility to some extent but they are still part of the resistance training category. Doing them the right way can help you grow and strengthen a few muscles.
Some of the muscles worked with curtsy lunges include:
- Quadriceps (front thighs)
- Glutes (butt)
- Hamstrings (back thighs)
- Calves
- Outer thigh muscles (hip abductors)
- Inner thigh muscles (hip adductors)
- Ankle muscles
- Core
Growing and strengthening these muscles offers a variety of other health and visual benefits.
Compared to regular lunges, curtsy lunges will target your outer thigh muscles, inner thigh muscles, and the muscles around your ankles a bit more.
These muscles often do not get a lot of attention so paying more attention to them can be helpful for certain purposes.
At the same time, curtsy lunges will typically still be the hardest for your quadriceps, glutes, hamstrings, and calf muscles.
If you are relatively new to working these muscles, bodyweight curtsy lunges could be enough to see nice training results.
On the other hand, more advanced lifters may need to do curtsy lunges with weights to see their desired muscle growth and strength progress.
2. Curtsy lunges can benefit weight loss
While there is a way to overdo it, losing excess body fat offers great health improvements.
There are different ways to make this happen but a popular method is doing exercises like curtsy lunges.
The first reason for this is that curtsy lunges will require more energy from your body than just sitting still.
Secondly, if you do curtsy lunges with enough weight and a good plan, they can help you build muscle mass.
In turn, this muscle mass will help you burn more energy throughout the day.
All this extra energy burning makes it more likely that you get to a point where you use more than is coming in. In a situation like this, you start using energy stores like body fat to get your needs.
As you may understand from this, you do still need to have somewhat good habits in areas like nutrition to be able to lose weight with curtsy lunges.
3. Curtsy lunges can improve balance and coordination
Even more so than the regular forward or backward versions, curtsy lunges will be challenging in terms of balance and coordination.
This can be a benefit in the sense that safely doing this can improve your skills in these areas.
Additionally, strengthening your ankle muscles, inner thigh muscles, and outer thigh muscles can also be helpful for balancing yourself.
These effects from doing curtsy lunges are not just helpful in your workouts.
The increase in balance and coordination can also help you avoid bumping into things and falling down during activities like walking around and climbing stairs.
4. Curtsy lunges help you avoid muscle imbalances
Curtsy lunges are a unilateral exercise which means they work one leg at a time.
This can be helpful in the sense that it makes working your legs the same way somewhat easier.
In two-legged exercises like squats, leg presses, and deadlifts it is still possible to use one side slightly more than the other.
The visual and muscle strength imbalances this would lead to are typically not desired.
One thing to note about curtsy lunges in this area is that you do want to find a way to keep your steps somewhat the same. For example with markers on the floor.
Stepping in different ways on each side can lead to muscle imbalances too.
5. Curtsy lunges can improve flexibility and mobility
Flexibility and mobility are basically how far your muscles can comfortably lengthen and how far your joints and tends can comfortably move.
Similar to many areas of the human body, you can improve your skills in these areas to some extent.
You can do this by doing exercises like curtsy lunges that challenge you in terms of flexibility and mobility in safe amounts.
Curtsy lunges can mainly help you improve these fitness components around your hips, knees, and ankles.
In turn, this could reduce your risk of injuries, reduce your risk of falling, and improve exercise performance.
6. Curtsy lunges can improve athletic performance
Potentially increasing your flexibility and mobility is not the only way curtsy lunges can improve your athletic performance.
As mentioned, doing curtsy in the right ways for your goals can also make your muscles bigger, stronger, and more powerful.
Often to a larger extent than just doing your main sport more.
In turn, this extra leg muscle power and strength can benefit your jump height and running speeds.
Curtsy lunges can benefit your performance in the many sports where these things give you an advantage.
Additionally, the improvements in ankle strength, balance, and coordination can be helpful in many other sports too.
7. Curtsy lunges can help you avoid injuries
As briefly mentioned in some of the previous benefits of curtsy lunges, the improvements in mobility, flexibility, and muscle strength of your hips, knees, and ankles, and the muscles around them can help you avoid issues in these areas.
This can be worth paying attention to, with curtsy lunges or other exercises, since some injuries can stop you from exercising for many weeks.
8. You can do curtsy lunges almost anywhere
Some people will need some extra resistance to make the movement challenging enough. However, in essence, curtsy lunges are still a bodyweight exercise.
This can be helpful in the sense that you don’t need to drive to your local gym or sports field to be able to work out.
When you are living your daily life, short car rides like this don’t seem like much.
However, if you think about it, even a 10-minute car ride for every workout really adds up over a few weeks and months.
In the case of curtsy lunges, you could just step out of bed, do some warm-up exercises, and start your curtsy lunge workout.
This also makes it easier to implement this exercise. When you have a few free minutes you could potentially do a few curtsy lunges.
Even if you do need something to make curtsy lunges harder, household objects like a backpack or grocery bag could fit your needs.
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