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The Key Health Shoulders & Low Back with Ultimate Sandbag Exercises

You will rarely hear me do it, that is say you GOTTA do THIS! Sure, with our Ultimate Sandbag exercises I have a lot of great ideas, but rarely do I think someone HAS to do anything specific.

That is why it may surprise you to hear me say you HAVE to do this one thing to have healthy shoulders and low backs. I am not overhyping things when I say it is one of the BIGGEST things that have helped me overcome bad training when I was young that left me with torn rotator cuffs and herniated discs in my spine.

What is this mysterious one thing? It may be a let down, but it is using your feet! Do you feel let down?

Over half of our bones are in our feet and hands. That means they are probably pretty important! Knowing HOW to use these areas of your body will make the whole body so much stronger!

At first a lot of people do, heck, a lot of people don’t know what I even mean by saying “use your feet”. After all, you are standing so how are you NOT using your feet!

I’ll bet many of you have heard of training barefoot or even wearing minimus shoes. That is all great, it builds awareness of your feet, but isn’t the same of what I am talking about.

First, why am I bothering with talking about your feet? I could go on a complex discussion on the neurology of the body and fascial lines connecting everything from the ground up, but let’s go with this. Any strong building has to be built upon a solid foundation. The weaker the foundation, the more unstable the building becomes.

So much begins in our body with what happens with our feet!

Same thing happens in your training. When you don’t consciously use your feet, you become weaker. Your knees, hips, low back, and even shoulders and upper body. In fact, there is a lot of research that shows spraining an ankle turns off or delays the activity of the glutes. So, there is plenty of science saying the feet are important for our total body.

Don’t believe me? Get in your squat stance, now, try to grab the ground with your feet like they were your hands grabbing the ground. First, do you notice a lot of tension in your glutes? You should! However, keep this tension and see, can you have your knees cave in when you squat holding the tension in the feet? Impossible isn’t it! You can see why we have to start from the ground up.

That is why in many of our Ultimate Sandbag exercises it is surprising what people actually feel when they do them correctly. Sometimes Ultimate Sandbag exercises that LOOK like we are working on upper body strength are actually designed to teach you to push down into the ground with your feet.


These Ultimate Ultimate Sandbag exercises look like just hard upper body training, but they do as much for your feet!

How do we teach this and how can Ultimate Sandbag exercises help? Thinking of your feet as the lower body of your hands is a good start. You want to think of grabbing the ground whenever possible. That is why squishy shoes can be very hard for the body because you can’t really feel where you are at.

You will notice in many of our Ultimate Sandbag exercises we put you in a Sprinter Stance, Half kneeling, or Split stance. Part of this is to work on other stability patterns, but a lot of it has to do with forcing you to push down in both feet to create stability. It is amazing how all of a sudden you feel strong, your core feels braced, and those knee and low back issues get better.

sandbag exercises

This is so simple but so important. In fact, this past year while I was teaching at the Perform Better Summits a young trainer came up to me afterwards. We had discussed the idea of the feet with our Ultimate Sandbag exercises and she wanted to know if it could help her. Apparently she would hurt her back time and time again on something as simple as a bent-over row.

I had her get in the position and something that is very common is that she started to get a big curve in her low back. She was dumping her pelvis forward and putting unnecessary stress on her low back. I asked her simply to grab the ground with her feet and pull the handles of the Ultimate Sandbag apart. With JUST telling her these cues her back went neutral, her pelvis self corrected. I didn’t give her some overly complex cue, I used principles of our Ultimate Sandbag exercises to TEACH her body HOW to work.

Jessica shows you how you can wake up your feet with these Ultimate Sandbag exercises. 

At the end of the day, this is what we really want to achieve. Using fitness to teach people how to move, feel, and perform better. When you see Ultimate Sandbag exercises like these where these coaches are suspended, that automatically makes the lead foot grab the ground. This isn’t a circus trick, but it is an advanced form of Ultimate Sandbag exercises that take real world fitness to another level!

Want to discover how to dramatically change people’s movement and fitness in minutes? THAT is what our DVRT education is all about! Don’t miss our upcoming events HERE or save 25% on our online courses HERE and get a special gift with coupon code “holiday”