20-Minute Lower Body Strength & Balance
This 20-minute lower body workout is built entirely around single-side training — every exercise is performed on one leg at a time, one side then the other, all the way through. That means your balance, stability, and core are working constantly alongside your legs and glutes. Training unilaterally like this exposes and corrects strength imbalances between sides, builds real functional strength, and challenges your body in a way that two-legged exercises simply can’t. One heavy dumbbell, 14 no-repeat intervals, plus a 3-minute finisher to close it out. Deceptively tough and completely worth it.
In this blog you’ll find a summary of the workout with some tips and notes. But if you just can’t wait to get moving, then go ahead and dive right into the workout.
If you have time, take my 5-minute warm up before your workout and my 5-minute post workout stretch when you’re done.
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Before You Begin
Description
Following a warmup, this workout is made up of 7 unilateral exercises for strength & balance, repeated twice one time each leg. Then there is a finisher with three full body moves. The purpose of the workout is to build strength, endurance, stability and balance in the lower body. I used 10 lb (4.5 kg), 12 lb (5.4 kg), 15 lb (6.8 kg), 20 lb (9 kg), and 25 lb (11.3 kg) dumbbells.
Workout Video
Workout Breakdown
There are 14 exercises in the main part of this workout. Perform each exercise for 35 seconds and rest for 20 seconds. The finisher starts after a 1:10 minute rest where the final 3 exercises are performed for 40 seconds each with 20 seconds rest between them.
Exercises
- Single Leg Squat (R)
- Single Leg Squat (L)
- Deadlift Squat (R)
- Deadlift Squat (L)
- Side Lunge + Knee Drive (L)
- Side Lunge + Knee Drive (R)
- Front Lunge with Twist (L)
- Front Lunge with Twist (R)
- Knee Lift Surrender (L)
- Knee Lift Surrender (R)
- Single Leg Deadlift (R)
- Single Leg Deadlift (L)
- Figure 4 + Side Leg Lift (R)
- Figure 4 + Side Leg Lift (L)
- Finisher: Turned Out Knee Lift (alt)
- Slow Skater (alt)
- 40s High March — 1 minute
