Fixing Bad Shoulders with THIS Ultimate Sandbag Exercise

At first glance it wouldn’t seem like having healthier shoulders and lunging well would have ANYTHING in common. If we understand the body and more importantly how we function in life you will see the VERY close connection good shoulders and lunging have. That is why you will find this Ultimate Sandbag exercise to be extremely important to both!

How in the world healthy shoulders and lunging related? Let’s look at this great break down by Mike Boyle and Gray Cook generalizing what different aspects of our body are meant to do in movement.

If you don’t see it, don’t worry, a lot of people don’t! What we are seeing here is that if the feet don’t create stability, if the hips don’t have mobility, it will impact the body up the chain to yes, the shoulders.

That’s why when we look at a DVRT Ultimate Sandbag exercise we don’t look JUST at the muscles, but how each on impacts the entire chain of the body. This is also why lunging is such a big deal in our choice of selecting the right DVRT Ultimate Sandbag exercise.

Yet, a lot of people may agree that lunging is important, but they struggle in themselves doing it well. Unfortunately, that is because people don’t work through the proper progressions and helping people understand HOW they are suppose to lunge.

That is why a simple looking DVRT Ultimate Sandbag exercise can be super powerful. Yes, our half kneeling Arc Press is one of those drills if you don’t look at it with the right pair of glasses you won’t really get what it is all about.

Why can such a simple Ultimate Sandbag exercise be the key to unlocking lunging AND helping your shoulders? One of the big reasons people struggle with lunging is they don’t know how to use their body and create stability during an unstable exercise.

Being in the half kneeling position allows us to introduce the lateral instability that good lunges require strength in performing. Just being half kneeling is good, but being active in it is more important. What do I mean? Most people make the mistake of not using their feet properly in this position and this takes away from a lot of the benefit. Once you engage the ground properly, your stability goes up, you feel the right muscles working, and you actually feel strong!

The Arc Press comes into play because it reminds of using the feet and more. The action of performing the Arc Press isn’t so much a demonstration of upper body strength as it is using the ground and having good core strength. How can we tell? If people lift up their rib cage or lean back they aren’t using either.

This Ultimate Sandbag exercise not only trains us to be strong up and down, but side to side too! One of the great unique benefits of the Arc Press is the fact we get lateral resistance to emphasize the part most people are weak. The frontal plane strength we build in the Arc Press has direct carry over to the lateral strength we need for a strong lunge!

When you put all the components of this Ultimate Sandbag exercise together you see you get so much out of it and solve a lot of issues at the same time. However, the key is being very thoughtful about what you are doing so DVRT Master, Cory Cripe, has put together an outstanding video on how you can maximize this Ultimate Sandbag exercise power house!

Learn how to train the body as it was designed to move and become more resilient and real world strong by attending one of our upcoming DVRT programs HERE