Whenever I walk into a weight room or look at someone’s lifting plan, there are two movements that are always consistent on lower body days (unless the program is brutally bad): there will be a heavy hinge movement throughout the scheduled week (deadlift, kettlebell swings, etc) and a heavy squat/push movement (squat, forward lunge, etc). And for most people, this makes complete sense. The squat and the deadlift have been two staples of lower body programs for years. It has proven to be effective, so why change it?
Today I will be talking about the first four weeks of my case study in which I will be looking at heavy lateral lunges and its’ effect on lateral power.
First, I want to discuss why this is relevant. For those that haven’t seen/read/heard about it already, I highly suggest you check out Graeme Lehman’s work on the subject. You can reach his blog here where he documents much of his research on the subject of lateral power in throwing velocity. Essentially, what he discovered was the further you can jump laterally, the harder you can generally throw. We can see why this would make sense:
In this portion of his delivery, Sonny Gray is creating momentum laterally, down the mound, which will be available later in the throw when his front foot plants. In theory, the more momentum he creates down the mound, the more force there will be to be transferred through the lower half and torso and into the arm. Now we need to make sure we are strong enough to handle that energy, but that is a discussion for a later time.
I am not advocating for guys to start “jumping” sideways off the rubber before delivering the pitch (Carter Capps anyone?) but I do want you to realize that the more force you can create and harness in that direction, the harder you will potentially throw.
Now, going back to the lifting portion from the beginning: why don’t we ever see baseball players, or anyone that needs substantial lateral power, using heavy lateral lunges as their “squat” movement for the week? This is the question I asked myself which eventually led me to this experiment. Before we get into that, I want to lay down some framework so everyone understands that I am not trying to say we should stop squatting. Like most “sport specific” type training, you need to be brutally strong before the plane you start working in even matters (squat works in the saggital plane, lateral lunge works in the frontal plane, which is also where players work before they throw to set up rotation, as we saw with Gray above). Generally, the strength you build in the saggital plane from squatting or reverse/forward lunging is going to make you fairly strong in the frontal plane without lateral lunges. However, for baseball players who work in the frontal plane more often than most of the other sports, it makes sense to me to get strong in a specific plane (frontal) after you have built up that general strength in the sagittal plane from squatting/lunging. Hence, the idea for me to run yet another experiment on myself.
To test my theory I replaced the heavy reverse lunges I had been doing (up to 305×3 for some context, at a bodyweight of 192) with heavy lateral lunges. That was the only variable to change from the previous month of training. I did all the same accessory exercises for that day, and the other lower body day stayed the same as well (heavy deadlifts as main lift followed by the accessory lifts). I worked in a 5, 3, 1 format but used the numbers 7, 5, 3 instead. So the first week I did 3×7, the second week 4×5, and the third week 5×3. I also used banded lateral hops and bodyweight lateral hops (which I measured) once per week, however I also used those exercises in the previous training block.
First week of lateral lunges. 115 for 7 reps here:
Final week of lateral lunges. 185 for 3 reps:
Banded lateral hops:
And then lateral to medial hops, the test I used to measure/track lateral power:
As you can see, it took me a little while to get used to the exercise being loaded as this is one that I don’t generally load up heavy. The first week I went pretty light and I was beginning to get more comfortable with it by the third week so I was able to go heavier and trust it.
Before starting the training period, my lateral leap was 81 inches on the right side and 79 inches on the left side. At the end of the 3 weeks, I tested on the 4th week, my lateral leap was at 83 inches on the right side and 82 inches on the left.
2 and 3 inches is a pretty substantial leap in just one month of training, especially since those numbers are already fairly respectable, which has me pretty excited. I am very interested to see what happens over the next month as I continue getting more comfortable and stronger in the frontal plane.
Now, a couple things. This was a case study which means I am the only one that performed the experiment. Just because it helped me gain some lateral power does not mean it will do the same for you. Much more testing is needed before any conclusions can be drawn. Secondly, I was working back from taking time off from throwing so I was not able to test my throwing velocity at the beginning or end of this experiment. We know that in general more lateral power leads to more velocity, but it would’ve have been interesting to see if I had a slight velo jump after the gains in lateral power.
I plan to continue this experiment for at least one more month. I will be sure to update you with the results when that time comes.
Thanks for reading! Questions or comments? Post them below or shoot me an email at brady@dacbaseball.com.