Beyond Planks Crawling Exercises for Core Strength

I remember it was one of the most challenging things we use to do for conditioning. Off-season basketball was far worse than in-season. While much shorter, our coaches made it their mission to get us both mentally and physically ready for the upcoming season. That meant all sorts of things that seemed like medieval torture and at the time they probably were a bit. Looking back, if we really understood what and why we were doing some of this crazy stuff we could have not just become tired, we could have been much better! Especially when it comes to things like crawling that just seemed simply evil at the time. 

Yea, we probably didn’t look to different from this type of crawling!

One of the worst things we ever had to do was go to the school’s football field. There we would be challenged to sprint specific times and if that wasn’t bad enough, do some crazy crawling! At the time I thought it was just a means for our coaches to make our lives worse. Fast forward over 20 years and maybe while that was their goal there could have been more. 

Crawling has seen a resurgence in fitness for a number of reasons. For one, it is a moving plank and as you know planks have passed crunches for the most popular core exercises. While most think that the way to progress in planks is to do them longer and longer. After all, more is better, isn’t it? 

At a point, planks stop really being productive for your core strength. What you want to do is challenge your ability to maintain the plank while you add in motion. All of sudden the plank changes, movement creates instability and creates a huge stress to your plank. Unfortunately people jump into WAY too difficult planks like crawling exercises before really establishing a better foundation. That is where something like our Bird Dog progressions can really help understand the purpose of crawling exercises in alignment, tension, and building strength. 

So, planking is one benefit, the other is the time under tension that your shoulders, hips, and core all get. In today’s fitness world, fast movements to get your heart rate up are all the rage. Unfortunately, one BIG thing we end up missing is time under tension. 

Why is this a bad thing? Many experts believe time under tension is a key component of not just building strength, but muscle as well. Here is the crazy part, we also assume that only fast movements get our heart rate up, but time after time we have found people’s heart rates jump into over time when they are placed in situations when their body is under high time under tension? 

How does that work? Well, if we put muscles under time under tension then we are extending the time they have to work. When we move quickly, the time our muscles are under tension is much less. Something to think about for sure! 

Sadly people go WAY too fast on crawling drills especially when we add in our Ultimate Sandbag drags. They lose SO much benefit by going way too fast or being out of position.

Lastly, we have a drill that builds cross patterning. Cross what?! When we walk, the most foundational movement we all perform and that makes us uniquely human, you will notice that our body works in opposites. Your right arm swings forward with your right leg. Why? This is the most efficient way to move and without getting too much depth about it (a blog for another time) we want to create movements that promote this cross patterning and crawling is a great way to do it!

Now, as with planks, eventually people want to increase the stress of their crawling drills. Using our DVRT Ultimate Sandbag Training drags is a wonderful way to add challenge and strengthening to the crawling exercises. Today’s video blog is all about how to do this correctly and some of the most common mistakes people make when adding these DVRT Ultimate Sandbag Training series. Check it out and see how this unassuming exercise can greatly benefit your fitness! 

We have our BOGO Ultimate Sandbag sale back! When you invest in any of our Ultimate Sandbags, get a second of equal or lesser cost for 50% off! Just use code “bogo” HERE