7 Secrets to Programming Limitless Plank Variations
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Hey, coaches, athletes What’s up, this will be the last plank video that you’re ever going to have to watch, because I’m going to turn you into a plank master who can create 1000s of plank variations, using the ancient ways of plank ism, formerly known as the undiscovered secrets of universal human movement. But before we get into that, please hit that LIKE SUBSCRIBE button to our channel for more movement strategy reveals on a weekly basis. Now, when I learned these strategies that I’m about to talk about, it really blew my mind. I can go several years, maybe even quite more honestly, working out every day, and without ever programming the same plank variation twice. Now what I’m going to teach you over the next few minutes is not something you’re going to find anywhere else on the YouTubes. Ultimately, my goal here isn’t to show you an exhaustive list of what kinds of plants you can do, it’s to open up to the understanding of the fundamentals of how to use your new understanding of human movement, to create a massive amount of variation of planks to fit the individual programming intentions of your clients or your athletes. Again, having the ability to perform crazy variability is not the big takeaway of this video, it has gotten a human body to produce the right amount of tension throughout the its entire core system. So it can overcome habitual movement dysfunctions, or surpass a performance hurdle that was once hindering growth. The plank is a human movement, fundamental stepping stone that we all had to accomplish well enough, before we had the ability to walk on these two feet. So simply put, if there’s a problem walking on these two feet, then perhaps returning to the fundamentals of walking can be a great place to start. So let’s dive into this sucker. The first thing we’re going to have to want to think about of how to think right not what to think how to think, is define the environment that we’re going to be doing this plank on. Now, as an example, I got a few tools that are in front of me, right, we’ve got some sliders right, we can easily do any sort of plank variation on our hands, put the sliders on the hands, or put the sliders on our feet and toes, right. So just knowing that we can do those things just provides a whole lot of variation and whole lot of parts to this puzzle. But the one thing I really want to cover, besides just putting any tool in front of us, whether it be a viper, a mess ball, and just doing kind of the list of any tool, it’s to understand that we have the option to go onto a box. And this is the one thing that I think most trainers miss out on is changing the height of art of our plank, and making a plank accessible to those athletes who really need it by not making them go on the ground. And that’s a big, big point that I think just right off the bat, we have to define what environment do we want success to start into. And then we can add all kinds of crazy things. One cool thing I want to show you is an abdali. If you guys don’t have an abdali this sucker is basically an AB wheel that allows crazy variability through four wheels. You know, the AB wheel right, though, allows you to go straight with a little bit arc abdali Huge, awesome tool, I highly recommend knock down a piece of equipment. Alright, so defining environment is a place that we have to start and remember, changing the height to make it easier is a huge missed opportunity that allows for exam success with intention of the tension of our core. Going on to number two. Second thing out how to how to do planks is the fund position that we’re going to be in. Now a plank is not just prone, it can be sideline and it can also be supine. Now any one of those three prone face down, sideline sideways, supine with your stomach up can be the basics of any one of those. So again, just to compound what we’ve already talked about briefly, we can do supine with sliders we can do prone on sliders, we can do sideline on sliders, pretty pretty straightforward, you can see how to start to compound, but we can also go prone on hands. We can go prone on elbows, we can go prone on elbows and knees. We can go prone on hands and knees. And we can start to position ourselves in something that we call an S f t. Taking into consideration that we have three planes of motion. I’m gonna dive a lot deeper later. But we can position ourselves in hands that are shoulder width apart. We can put one in front of the other. We call that our x x we can go L x x or left hand from the other. We can go hands wide. We can go hands narrow. We can go hands internally rotated. We can go hands externally rotated. We can do the same thing with our forearms. We go wide, we go narrow, we can go elbows out, we can go elbows in. If you followed along and actually did those with me, you would realize how much the course tension changed. With every different position, I went just the upper body. Let’s take that same consideration of our lower body. Let’s see, I’m all my elbows, just a neutral stance, I can go toes, split stance, again, we call our x x, we can go left LXX,
we can go feet wide, we call it x, w x, we can go narrow, we can go heels out, we can go heels in, just try the heels out and heels in with me, and realize the tension that is changed through the pelvis as it runs into the court. It’s pretty crazy. If you want to go kneeling with that, we can do the same thing we go hands on knees, we can split our knees. Again, you can see where I’m going just by changing the six different basic symmetrical positions of our limbs, upper body and lower body. Now, if you’re doing the math with me, we’re already increasing numbers. We’re already increasing numbers, by just defining two different ways to think about positioning equipment, and positioning our body. So just start to kind of roll with me a little bit as we realize, like, wait a minute, there’s a heck of a crazy amount of ways that we can do this. Again, not just variability as the important part, it’s actually not the most important part. It’s the intention on why you’re doing those things to match the client’s needs, wants, etc. The next thing we want to go after is the driver. Think about how we can position the body’s movements with different drivers, and we want to be my drivers, what’s driving the motion? Where’s the momentum coming from? In a typical plank that we’ve been taught? We’ve been kind of taught to just hold still static. And I’m going to have to say that is probably one of the worst ways to do a plank. Is it a bad way? No, because your intention may be pure. But it’s one of the worst ways to apply it to functional movement patterns, right? So unless your function is literally doing a plank contest, hey, go static all the all day long, hold it until literally you can. But in reality, it’s of human athleticism, what a plank static is not the way you want to go. So what can we do instead? Well, going into a plank, the first thing I want to think about is how can I drive my pelvis to create momentum through a particular pattern, maybe I can drive my foot in a certain patterns, maybe I can drive my hand in certain patterns. And maybe I can even drive my head. In certain patterns, if you’re looking away to start someone’s progress on a plank. That’s very, very light and progressive. Think about where the soul cranium goes, what that does to the, to the cervical spine, how that attaches to the thoracic spine and drives into the lumbar and pelvis. It’s nuts what the body is and how it’s interconnected. But the drivers don’t just stop there. I can now think about them in a in a universal pieces by saying what if I take my hand and my foot? What if I take them to different patterns that really start to say, wait a minute, not just one of them off the ground. But I can go two limbs off the ground. Once you start to remove your structural stability points from the ground, the body has to start saying I better produce way more tension. If not, I fall flat on the ground. Again, I was just showing those from a prone position. I can do those same thing from a sideline, the same thing from a supine position as well. Again, compounding the possibilities of where to fit in your knowledge now of planks. And we’re just halfway done. This is just the tip of the iceberg. But from what already I’ve showed you, I want you to know that the other kinds of variations you can think of so I want you to think of a few others, put them into a combination in a comment below. And let’s see what kind of answers you come up with. Take just what you’ve learned about environment, what you learned about position, and what you learned about driver and make a combination, throw it in there and just see what happens in the comments, you’re gonna start to get some pretty cool, awesome answers that help programming for maybe a future client. Let’s move on to our force. Part of this understanding is defining that we can move our body in different angulations. Simply put, our body has three definitive movement patterns, forward and backwards, side to side, and rotational. But really, each one of those patterns has two endpoints. In the sagittal plane we have anterior and post You’re here. In the frontal plane, we have right lateral and left lateral. And then the transverse plane we have right rotational and left rotational. Again, always going back to the basic application of what a plank can do. Let’s do this in a hip driver, I have my posterior into your drive, I have my left lateral, and right lateral drive, I have my right rotational left rotational drive, I said those backwards, that’s okay, I have my anterior and posterior hand drive, my left and right lateral hand drive, my right to left rotation and right to right rotation, hand drive, I’m going to same thing with my leg. And you can see how all fits together, and just driving the angulations. Now once you understand what the possibilities are of an angulation, you start to say, wait a minute, if I rotate my hips to the right, and I actually take my left foot forward, so hip rotation to the right, okay, like that with left foot forward, or that’s kind of like doing a pivot step in basketball, that matches the hit pattern that you may do in the game of basketball. Well, that’s cool. So now you can start to transition, a core sensation into an upright function, you can start to see where intentionality starts to come with the variability and understanding of what’s happening. Don’t discount this stage of triangulation, with the again, the intention of the tension that you’re trying to create. It is one of the most powerful things that of this entire video is the angulation of movement. But let’s give kind of some more kind of depth. Let’s define the actions that we can actually do. And the action is simply the move. It’s what you’re actually doing. So in a plank, you’re just driving your pelvis, such as the pelvis drive, if you’re reaching your hands, well, that’s just a hand reach. But that’s essentially what we’re trying to do, right? So I can certainly go into a plank and I can do a foot reach forward, a foot reach opposite side, rotational, a foot reach, right? Rotational? Certainly that so we have reaches, well, we got it. We can also locomote we can actually travel we actually go somewhere. So what if I did a cross sequence? I’m actually going somewhere still holding a prone plank, just my prone plank is on a hands. And on toes, can I not do the same thing posterior? Can I do the same walking pattern as I go posterior? And the answer is absolutely, don’t be limited by what things are called, be limited by the principles of understanding of what is the pattern. Now the cool thing about doing any sort of crawling is you can do short long bursts, or you can just do quick in sync patterns is right where you are or a pivot. But it gets beyond that. What if I actually want to take jumping into a plank, let’s do a side plank. What’s the definition of a jump, it’s two feet leaving the ground and two feet returning back to the ground. At the same time, I just did a side plank, split foot stance jump, I can do a split foot stance, single leg jump, which is really called the hop, single foot two single foot, I can do single foot to the opposite side foot, that’s defined as a leap. So I’m starting to put to put verta motion into my planks providing the same ballistic need of my body. But now integrating it into a core focus drill that allows the transference hopefully, to upright motion, again, depending on your intention, a lot about that too is I can do that with my upper body, I can do a jump from elbows, I can do a jump switch from elbows. And again, if you think about the different patterns, and the positions that I talked about, we have switching out from quarterback, switching out from side to side, even switching up from a rotational angulation. Again, I’m gonna get really tired if I start showing you all the different variations. In fact, it’d be impossible, this, this video wouldn’t probably even fit on an upload to YouTube. But the point I’m trying to make is it’s how to think about it, not what to think about it. And the last thing I really want to cover is the sequencing. And I got into it a little bit before. But there’s a whole big definition of how you actually do the movement patterns. The biggest one that I want you to focus on is whether it’s in sync, or out of sync. Here’s what I’m talking about. Here’s a pronoun hands and on toes, plank with in sync jumping feet. But I can also go out of sync jumping feet, you would know that as a mountain climber. Well I can do the same thing with my hands. I can basically go out of sync hands where I can go in sync, hence, the same pattern exists. But don’t forget that I can do that with my hands and feet at the exact same time. I can now go here, here, and here, I can go wide and narrow. And you start to think about Wait a minute, what are the ways I can do a jumping jack, if I can do a plank like that? What are the options for a jumping jack, and that’s a whole nother video. But I also want to think about you can hold certain positions as well,
I can hold a wide stance. And in that wide stance, I can now do crossover or or out of sync rotational legs, I can do in sync, side to side legs. And again, how many different positions can you hold in your hands to now sequence the body in other parts, it gets nuts, it gets nuts. And that’s where I want you to think about, I’m gonna give you a few different kind of defining factors. For the close this thing up, you can hold different parts of your body in different positions, and then switch them out. You can go in sync, meaning both limbs go together, you can go out of sync go both, both limbs go the opposite way, you can have the hands and feet go together in sync, we have the hands, the feet go out of sync together, you have the hands go in sync and the feet go out of sync. And then vice versa. And all that is just do with sequencing versus on top of the environment, the position, the angulation the action, and of course, any other tool that you want to combine with it, whether it be a viper, whether it be a suspension trainer, a TRX whether it be a dumbbell, whether it be a band, it gets nutty. So that’s the fun part about what we’re going to be doing and talking about as we get through this. Now, that’s all I have for you today in this video. And I’ve made shown you a few examples. But again, the options are truly limitless, and having the knowledge that access that potential is the is the key takeaway. So now that you have the ability to be a plank master, if you want to take it up a notch and become a movement master, then head to the description below and check out our link for the multi dimensional movement coaching mentorship program, where we dive super deep in the fundamentals of and truths of movement to teach you how to apply this all this whole knowledge set so you can access and fulfill the potential as you as a coach, or even you as an athlete. So again, click the link in the description below to learn more. Thanks for hanging in there. Don’t forget to like and subscribe to our channel to unlock more access to your training and performance potential. Have a good day. Cheers.
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