Going Beyond Planks with Ultimate Sandbag Workouts

In our last blog post (here) I spoke about the impact power training has to not just getting you more fit, or driving up your metabolism, but quality of life as well. That meant we were talking about not just being powerful up and down, but applying our concept of power to the real three dimensional world we live in. Of course that means showing you how we can use Ultimate Sandbag workouts to progress the ideas of real functional fitness for your own training.

When it comes to power training, we rarely produce a lot of power just up and down. In fact, if I gave you a ball and asked you to throw it as far as possible, you would do something very specific. You would create ROTATION to throw the ball. Yes, rotational training is probably the best form of real world power training and yet it gets neglected the most.

Sure, you can use medicine balls and cables to do rotation, but you will find DVRT Ultimate Sandbag workouts give you a bit more. How so? For one, using DVRT Ultimate Sandbag workouts allows for more progressions of rotation. We tend to oversimplify rotation to only moving or throwing a weight across our body. Yet, when you look at how people punch, kick, throw, and so much more, you will find they create rotation with force coming from all sorts of directions and angles. Our training needs to do the same.

Another advantage of DVRT Ultimate Sandbag workouts is we can work on what world renowned spine specialist, Dr. Stuart McGill, calls “the pulse”. What Dr. McGill is referring to is the fact that when we create rotational power two things really happen. One, we have very quick movements of our core being very relaxed and tight. You can’t produce a lot of power if you try to keep the tension of a plank the entire time you rotate. Instead, real rotational power is based on how fast you can balance relaxation and tension.

The other idea of the pulse is the fact that rotation doesn’t really happen just one way. What do I mean? When people swing a baseball, serve a tennis ball, and do anything of great rotational power you see them do something first. They actually move back before they rotate. Why? We are actually rotational beings and our body are designed with this in mind. Like winding up a yo-yo, moving back “winds” our fascial system up and allows us to create more power and force.

Pretty cool huh?

When we look at our DVRT Ultimate Sandbag workouts we see how we build these layers of more complex power movements. Our Ultimate Sandbag workouts first focus upon the foot work, core strength, and posture required in rotational training. Sadly, most people focus on the WRONG things like moving through their low backs and just swinging weight around their bodies (which is actually anti-rotation not rotation but a post for another time). The great DVRT coaches from Envision Fitness have put together a great little series showing how we move our rotational training from foundational to complex. How we move from learning the foot work and postures to the pulse and really dynamic exercises.

Real life fitness is about understanding how the body works and creating better workouts and exercises to address those needs. That’s one of the very BIG reasons we believe so much in these DVRT Ultimate Sandbag workouts.

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A post shared by Josh Henkin’s Ultimate Sandbag (@ultimatesandbag) on Apr 18, 2017 at 5:09pm PDT