Lunges are an amazing exercise that can be used to prevent injury, strengthen your hamstrings and quadriceps, improve core stability, and improve your tennis game! Since many of our FiT Athletes are tennis players, we want to introduce a few lunge variations to help improve your speed and strength on the tennis court. 

1. The Basic Body Weight Lunge - begin with this lunge first, as it is the building block for the rest of our variations. Start with your feet together, and slowly lift your right or left foot forward. Keeping your abs engaged and shoulders back, slowly lower your body down towards the floor. Try to get your right thigh parallel with the floor, bent at a 90 degree angle. Make sure you push up through the front heel as you return to starting position. You may alternate legs. For a good warm up, perform walking bodyweight lunges to a cone and back. 

Reactive training, or more commonly known as jump training, utilizes the stretch-shortening cycle to enhance neuromuscular efficiency and rate of force production. In order to improve athletic performance, it is important to understand the three phases.

1. Eccentric phase: The muscle stretches prior to activation and increases muscle spindle activity. Potential energy is stored in the elastic components of the muscle during the force reduction phase.

2. Amortization phase: Involves dynamic stabilization and is the amount of time between the eccentric contraction and the initiation of the concentric contraction. You want to limit the amount of time spent in this phase, because the more rapidly you can change from eccentric to concentric contraction, the more powerful the response.

3. Concentric phase: Force production resulting in enhanced muscular performance following the eccentric phase of muscle contraction. 

Reactive training programs have been proven to be beneficial for decrease in injuries, increase in strength and endurance, enhanced muscle balance ratio of the hamstrings and quadriceps, increased leg power and performance, and a decrease in ACL injuries in females.