Lateral exercises are crucial to preventing injury in sport and moving with ease in your daily life.
Lateral exercises often take a backseat. When COACH+ Dennis Torres looks around his Club, Equinox Van Mission, he says he typically sees people doing lateral raises to target their shoulders and maybe some oblique exercises. But the side-to-side training tends to end there.
It’s time to start prioritizing them, particularly for the lower body. These exercises, which occur in the frontal plane of motion, are key to injury prevention, says Torres.
Think about playing tennis. You quickly change direction, bounding from one side of the court to the other to hit the ball before it bounces twice. “If you're not training the capacity of your joints and [muscles] with these lateral movements, then you're leaving potential risk on the table when you're in a sport,” says Torres.
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Research suggests lacking strength in the hip adductors (the muscles that pull your leg toward the midline of your body; the adductor longus, adductor brevis, adductor magnus, and gracilis) is a risk factor for groin and hip injuries in some sports.
This limitation can lead to decreased muscle capacity and an imbalance between the muscle group and the hip abductors (the muscles that drive your leg away from your midline; the gluteus medius, gluteus minimus, and tensor fasciae latae). In turn, there’s a greater muscle injury risk during side-to-side cutting, striding, and sudden direction changes, according to an article published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine.
Runners in particular could benefit from emphasizing lateral movements in their workouts, says Torres. The gluteus medius stabilizes the pelvis during lower-body movement, and strengthening the hip abductors has been shown to improve knee joint kinematics, reducing knee valgus (exhibited by knees caving inward). Meanwhile, weakness in the muscle group has been associated with iliotibial band syndrome in distance runners. Performing exercises that strengthen those muscles could help manage those risks, says Torres.
Even if you’re not a competitive athlete, training your muscles and joints laterally can make side-to-side movement in your everyday life easier, says Torres. You leap to the side to avoid a puddle while hiking. You bend sideways to pick your sneakers off the floor. And you reach up and to the side to grab a towel off the top closet shelf. Life doesn’t happen in one dimension, says Torres, so your body needs to be ready and able to move through the 3D world.
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In each of your workouts, incorporate one to two lateral exercises to round out your training. Use bodyweight versions in a warm-up to wake up your joints before lifting heavy, or add load to challenge strength and build muscle, suggests Torres.
To target the lower body, try lateral lunges (add a slider under the extended leg for a stability challenge), cossack squats, Copenhagen planks, lateral step-ups or step-downs, lateral shuffles, and speed skaters. To train the upper body, program chest flies, reverse flies, lateral raises, TRX lateral rows, and TRX angels. For the core, turn to single-arm suitcase carries (which challenge anti-flexion), lateral plank walks or bear crawls, and planks with hip dips.
Take it from Torres. As a basketball player who has dealt with ankle sprains from sideways movement, the Coach knows firsthand how beneficial these exercises can be. “I've incorporated lateral lunges a lot, and I didn't realize how much that would help me,” he says. “I feel so much more stable since incorporating lateral movements. I feel more comfortable moving side to side, and I feel a lot stronger than I was before.”