Ultimate Sandbag Exercises for Better Core & Glutes

I believe it was Dan John that said, “everything works, at least for awhile.” Dan is always very smart in how he simplifies things so that training doesn’t feel so overwhelming. He is right, to a point, about this popular statement. His point that there are a lot of methods, programs, tools, and exercises that can be effective is true. However, saying that everything works isn’t exactly right as something actually go against your needs and goals. So, one of the goals we have with Ultimate Sandbag exercises is to teach you the why’s as well as the how’s so you can figure out what’s right for you. As I often say, you don’t have to do every exercise in DVRT, you have to do the RIGHT exercise.

A great example is helping people understand getting fixated on just the “basics” doesn’t work…for long. That’s because what people often misunderstand to be the basics (exercises like squats, deadlifts, etc.) are good exercises but they have so many different variations to fit our real world movement skills. You see, most people that quote that you should just do the basics fail to realize that the old strength athletes they quote also wrestled, dabbled in gymnastics, and often worked very manual labor intensive jobs.

What is “basic” to one person can be complicated to another

I point this out because they would actually get the training of moving in different directions, patterns, and postures, that we almost never do nowadays. Most times nowadays people are moving and improving their bodies mostly only at the time they go to the gym. Statistics show that less than 5% of adults participate in 30 minutes of physical activity each day only one in three adults receive the recommended amount of physical activity each week (U.S. Department of Health & Human Service)

The idea of just, “dong the basics” doesn’t work because we don’t live that way. When people ask us how we came up with so many of our DVRT Ultimate Sandbag exercises, it was largely just thinking about how we move in real life. Not replicating our activities in daily life, but using DVRT Ultimate Sandbag exercises to build the qualities we use in life.

One of the most important that people still struggle to use is the different planes of motion. In everything we do in life we move in three planes of motion. Using these planes of motion is how our body is structured to walk, move, and live its best. Yet, when you go to the gym people rarely think of their frontal plane of transverse plane exercise. Well, I can’t totally say that as people have gotten better, but there is more misinformation than ever.

There really shouldn’t be as the concept is relatively simple. However, in a day and age where there is so much pressure to create new exercises, people come up with some pretty “interesting” things. The goal of our DVRT Ultimate Sandbag exercises is to simplify these concepts and make it really easy to use.

I know, you might be thinking, “Josh, I use these other planes, I do lateral lunges, medicine ball throws, and stuff like that!” That’s great, but I want you to think about them in a much bigger way and how we can really expand what we think of using the different planes of motion.

One of the best places to start is learning to RESIST the frontal and transverse planes. If we look at the shape of the glutes, obliques, lats, and many muscles of the trunk and pelvis we notice these muscles run in a fan shape. That tells us they do multiple jobs at once, one of the bigger ones is learning to RESIST motion to keep our posture and alignment during motion.

Renowned strength coach, Robert Dos Remedios, has stated on many occasions how athletes get hurt due to their inability to resist motion. We have shared how spinal expert, Dr. Stuart McGill, has pointed out this same fact in this great example;

“Consider a 340 pound NFL lineman, who is strength trained in the weight room on Olympic lifts and power cleans. His coaches believe he is well trained. Yet the athlete has back pain that limits training. Measuring his cutting speed – the ability to take 5 fast strides forward, plant a foot and cut to the right reveals his great weakness and strength imbalance. The pelvis drops on the swing leg side and the spine bends laterally. He reports a twinge of pain. All of his strength training has been performed with two legs on the ground. All of the pulls, lifts and presses never trained the core in 3-dimensions.”

With this in mind, we need our strength training to match the same progressions as we would for any other form of training. Performing a token lateral lunge or so forth isn’t a system, it doesn’t give us direction to our training. That is why today’s blog post I wanted to show you our system of DVRT Ultimate Sandbag exercises in progressing the planes of motion and how we build such movements from the ground up!

Don’t miss our DVRT Workout Programs that help put together these important pieces to the fitness puzzle that make DVRT so unique. Check it out HERE!