Lord of the lunge

It’s another one for the books. On Fri., March 25, New Yorker Austin Head set a Guinness World Record for lunging. As in those horrible exercises they make you do at the gym until your quads freeze up.

A trainer at Life Time Fitness in Brooklyn, Head broke the record by lunging 2,825 times in an hour through his DUMBO (“Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass”) neighborhood in Brooklyn. That’s 47 lunges a minute for those with a calculator, enough to smash the old record of 2,358 lunges. (Yes, apparently this lunging is a thing.)

All this, and 12 days earlier, he also set a record for longest distance travelled by lunge in one hour: 2.14 miles. 

Why anyone would want to do this, let alone with a crowd of New Yorkers looking on, is beyond us. But Head, 30, said he was not motivated by bikini or mountain bike season. He did it for the children. Yep – hot legs and a kind heart. During his ordeal – which we feel safe referring to it as – he raised $7,599 for the Life Time Foundation, which funds health and wellness programs for NYC youth.

Head said he was motivated by a brother with disabilities and helping his mom care for him. “This rooted in me the need to help people. I also loved acting as a kid. Being a group instructor really is a perfect balance between the two.” he said.

Head, who teaches up to 30 fitness classes a week, said he started lunging during the pandemic, going for 45-minute stints.

One word of advice (other than to invest in beefy knee pads): rest days are OK. (We know, heresy in some circles.) “At the start I was over training way too much … I would be extremely sore from a lunge session and would have to teach a full day of classes,” he said. “I quickly noticed how important recovery was.”

Theragun massages, IVs, red light therapy, cold plunges and stretching all figured prominently in his recovery routine. He also listened to Tony Robbins and “inspirational, uplifting” music and never lost sight of his goal. “It is a big sacrifice ... find your why or purpose. Then on days you feel like giving up, always go back to your ‘why’.”

How long Head’s record will, uh, stand, is anyone’s guess. But we’re willing to bet there are a few crusty old telemarkers out there who could give him a lunge for his money. Plus, they’re already used to constantly asking themselves “why?”