By Request: Benefits of Plank

This month, I’m taking requests for things folks want to know about fitness (yes, please!  Ask me questions and I will blog the answers!).

First up:  what are the benefits of doing planks?

 

1.     Upper body strength.  Hanging out in a plank position means a lot of weight bearing on the arms.  As we get stronger, we’re able to hold our planks for longer periods of time.

2.     Alignment.  Getting the wrists in position directly under the shoulders allows the body to rely on the bones for support.  Maintaining the straight line from the back of the head through the heels requires lots of little muscle adjustments that pay off in our daily posture.

3.     Core control.  (Brief digression:  the core muscles are not just our abdominals in the front.  The muscles of the lower back, the diaphragm, and the pelvic floor are also part of our core.)  All of our core muscles are challenged when we hang out in a plank position.  We need to balance the contributions from all four sides of our core to maintain the proper form.

4.     Breath control.  New plankers often struggle to keep breathing while planking.  Learning to breathe into the chest while the lower abdomen is contracted is a useful skill.  When we develop multiple breath techniques, we are more able to tap into the energizing and relaxing possibilities of breath.

5.     Adaptability.  The plank has multiple variations and there is a version that works for almost everyone.  I love the elbow plank to target the abdominals, the classic plank to challenge upper body strength, the side plank to work obliques, and the side plank with the upper arm and leg lifted for max work.

 

Go try it!

Monday Workout: All the Things

Just a pretty straightforward workout this week.  We’ve got some core and balance challenges, some oblique work, and our deltoids won’t like us when we’re done (they’ll be fine, really.).  Three rounds.

 

squat raises	30
bench press	20
kickbacks	10
leg kicks	30
rows	20
round lunges	10
woodchoppers	30
flies	20
windscreen wiper	10

 

The Amazing Stickie and Butterfly Crunch

The Amazing Stickie is changing up her crunch game today.  Instead of putting her feet flat on the floor, she is putting the soles of her feet together while lying on the floor, making a diamond shape with her legs (or butterfly position!).  Because Stickie loves Pilates, she uses the chest lift technique to do her crunches:  she slides her breast bone toward her heels, allowing her head to float up off the floor.  Then she returns to the start position.

She likes to do a set of ten.

Task Oriented

Those of us who have been hanging around in fitness circles for a long time are used to saying or hearing stuff about muscles.  We talk about pulling in our abs or engaging our glutes.  Those cues are fine, as far as they go, but sometimes we do better to focus on what it is we are trying to do.  Then we let our bodies figure it out.

Take, for example, our friend the crunch (or, for you Pilates folks out there, the chest lift).  Of course it works our abdominal muscles.  It also helps us to move our spines one vertebra at a time.  When we think only about the abs, we tend to yank our heads and upper bodies up with a ton of tension in the neck.  If, instead, we make our goal to move our sternum toward our heels, our abdominals end up working both more intensely and more efficiently.  Our necks stay relaxed.  Our spines have the space they need to move segmentally.  We do better.

 

Similarly, when we’re presented with balance challenges, we want to focus on staying over our center of gravity.  With that as a goal, our bodies know to use our core muscles (all of them, not just the abs!) and all our glute and leg muscles to stabilize us.  We don’t micromanage the how; we give the task and get out of the way.

 

Go play.

One at a time

In Pilates, we learn that we can only do so many things at once.  This applies in lots of ways, but the way I’m thinking about right now is about how our spines move.

Our spines move, roughly, along three axes.  We can flex and extend our spines (bending forward and back).  We can side bend left and right.  We can twist.

 

The interesting thing is that we have the greatest range of motion along any of those axes when we are only moving one way.  That is, we can bend forward and back more when we’re not also trying to side bend or twist, or we can twist more when we’re not also bending to the side, etc.

 

So if we are trying to increase our ability to move in a particular direction, we will do best if we work on just that one thing at a time.  We can add the other fancy stuff later, when we’ve achieved our range of motion goals.

Monday Workout: Christmas in June

It’s time for Christmas in June!  We do this workout twice a year, once in the summer and once in December.  Here’s how it works.  On the first “day” we do one push press.  Then we move on to the second “day” and do two goblet squats and one push press.  We continue on through the days until on the last round we do 12 plyojacks, 11 kettlebell swings, etc. all the way to that last push press.  I realize that this means we end up doing 42 burpees before we are done.  I am not sorry.  Try to keep the rests between the “days,” but, obviously, rest when needed.

 

1 push press

2 goblet squats

3 Overhead press

4 1 leg squats each leg

5 deadlifts

6 burpees

7 pushups

8 renegade rows

9 mountain climbers

10 jump lunges

11 kb swings

12 plyojacks

The Amazing Stickie and Windshield Wiper

The Amazing Stickie loves working on control.  Winshield wipers definitely help her.

She begins lying on her back with her legs straight up in the air.  Keeping her shoulders on the ground, she swings her legs left and then right.  Ten reps should do it.