How to Modify Lunges For People With Poor Vision, Balance, & Strength

Modified Lunges 101

Lunges are a great exercise to strengthen your quads, glutes, and your entire lower body. Unfortunately, it takes quite a bit of mobility to do a full lunge to depth, for individuals with limited mobility. Todays article, in addition to the video above, will briefly detail how I help individuals work their single leg strength with lunges, even with poor vision, balance, and strength.

Lunging Regressions

There are numerous ways that we can regress lunges to make them better suited for individuals with limited mobility and decreased vision or balance. The way I leveraged lunges in the workout demonstrated in the video above, is by changing two things. This being, range of motion, and the balance aspect. Technically, we don’t use any load for this either, so that could be a third change. But for what it’s worth, we will just call this a bodyweight lunge.

Range of Motion

In the video, I shortened my clients range of motion in doing the lunge. This is a very simple tweak, but allows us to build strength to their current capability level. I also added a “boost” off of the ground, which adds a source of “landmark” for my clients back knee to touch on, before pushing with the front active leg to stand back up. This is a great way to make sure they don’t go too low AND we are able to measure progression over time.

Balance Aspect

The other aspect that I tweaked when working with my client in this instance, was the balance aspect. Balance is incredibly challenging when doing any unilateral exercise, especially lunges. By offering a Walker (as noted in the video), to hold onto, this takes the balance aspect out of the movement. This makes it much easier to actually complete the exercise. Over time, we would hopefully be able to get rid of the extra balance support. But of course, doing lunges with less balance, is much better than no lunges at all. Try these variations out for yourself!

Equipment Used

In the video demonstration, we did use a walker as assistance to hold on to, and a small boost to help shorten the range of motion on the lunges. I am going to link both of these products below, so you can check them out for yourself, if you wanted to work the modified lunges at home.

Before You Go..

If you want to continue to improve your health and knowledge of the gym, regardless of your current abilities, you need to subscribe to our blog. Otherwise I created another great article below, showing you how I program squats for a 92 year old man.

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