How Core Strength Teaches Better Strength Training

If there is a theme that I hope people get out of DVRT is that it is designed to be a solution. I didn’t create the system or the Ultimate Sandbag to teach you “sandbag training”. In fact, NONE of our tools matter if they don’t help us propel people closer to achieving our fitness goals. For the past 25 years of being in the fitness industry, 99.9% of people I helped wanted fitness to help improve another aspect of their life. Whether it was their confidence, their aches/pains, their ability to have more energy to do the things they loved, even their general health.

This is important for me to have people understand because even if you look past the tool of the Ultimate Sandbag, I hope you end up seeing a solution based program that is far more effective in helping people be successful. One of the concepts that really demonstrate this well is how we teach core strength in a myriad of ways, all designed with different goals in mind. Let me give you some examples of how we actually achieve this pretty lofty goal.

Core Strength Training Is The Foundation

The core is called the core and not the abs because we are talking about over 35 muscles that make up the trunk. It is the core of our body as well as our movement. If our core strength is poor (I’m not talking how many sit-ups you can do), then everything else we want to do suffers. We can’t be as strong in our lower or upper body and we make ourselves more prone to injury. So, how does training core strength in a meaningful way make everything better?

Cory Cripe does a great job of laying a foundation to our core strength efforts in how we teach our Press Outs. Probably a better plank for people because they don’t have to support their whole bodyweight, but they understand how to “brace” their core to create the core strength and stability we need to really set a foundation for our body to move and perform. You will hear us talk a lot about the lats when we refer to core training because they have a HUGE influence upon our core strength and stability, but also many people who are trying to train the core use the flexors of the body like the chest and shoulders and NOT the lats which is a MAJOR mistake!

You can see how large the lats are and the influence they have on our core training efforts. If we don’t have them lats as a point of emphasis we are going to miss the benefits!

Above, DVRT UK Master, Greg Perlaki shows some great progressions of our DVRT Press Outs. You see the Press Out with our Core Strap attached to now not just brace, but learn how to resist rotation and lateral motion (this is especially powerful in the half kneeling position).

You then see how Greg progresses to our Arc Press which takes the concepts of the Press Out but by changing the leverage to overhead we increase the core training demands and the lateral motion of the Ultimate Sandbag bringing in elements of our side plank as well. However, since the Arc Press can be hard to incrementally or jump up higher loads in, we often like to challenge the the Arc Press for greater core strength by using the same concept of the Core Strap to increase the lateral demands of the movement. Now we get an amazing side and front plank type of effect while learning how to integrate the whole body from the feet up and improve our shoulder mobility at the same time.

 

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What I think is one of the strongest parts of DVRT is how we continue to build off of these concepts from foundational as you saw with Cory tall kneeling to eventually in many lunge progressions like you see here. The benefit of doing drills like our Rotating Press Out with Core Strap is that the proximal stability that I get from the Press Out is also helped by actively having to pull the weight in as I come up. This creates a spring type action where many people don’t have the brute strength to come out of the lunge and this type of movement will help people learn that how to use the whole body to move with much more strength and efficiency.

Once we understand concepts then we can use these strategies for so many progressions of movement. Integrating core strength and training should ALWAYS be a goal of ours because our body works better when we do. There isn’t a time in life where not using our core would be a better idea. If we just thought this way when we taught our movements we would probably see people being far more successful.

Don’t miss out on saving 20% on our Ultimate Sandbags AND get our Core Strap for FREE (with training videos as well to how to maximize its use) with code “core” HERE

 

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