What's up guys?
Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX.COM
I know it's one of those overused sayings, "The Best Ab Exercise Ever", but this truly
is, one of the best Ab Exercises ever,
if not the best if you're trying to train your Abs like an athlete.
Now we talk about training you entirely like an athlete here on the ATHLEANX channel
but this particular exercise is one of my favorites for the Core because we're going
to hit your Core the way it's meant to be hit.
We're going to hit it from all three angles.
Let me show you the exercise right off the bat.
This is a Side Plank Pull.
The Side Plank Pull is an awesome exercise because we are actually training the Abs through
all of their function,
and we're training it in multiple directions.
We're training it in all three planes of motion.
So let me break it down here for you.
We've got three planes of motion that we operate in.
The first is the Sagittal Plane which is the front to back movements that we do.
Then we've got our Frontal Plane which is the side to side movements.
And then the all important, Transverse Plane.
But sometimes we don't even have to move, right.
The muscles can be working by preventing movement in any one of those Planes as well.
And that's what this exercise does a great job of.
And because we usually lack stability in our Cores, if we're weak this will actually help
us to build the stability in all three Planes.
So back to the exercise again.
In this exercise take a look first and foremost at that Sagittal Plane.
We're driving our knee up into our chest and that's a Sagittal Plane motion, front to back.
That's causing flexion of the spine.
And a flexion of the spine is an Ab generated movement, it's an Ab powered movement.
There's Hip flexor involved sure, but if you get your butt, most importantly, to curl under
and get your pelvis to go into a Posterior Tilt,
you're going to be using your Abs, so we're hitting that function right off the bat.
Then we go into our next two important functions.
We have through the virtue of the Side Plank, we have a Frontal Plane Hold.
So if you look at me from really down low here, you can see that if I start doing this
exercise improperly,
I lose the stability of my Core by allowing my hip to drop down to the ground with each
rep.
That's not what you want.
If you're going to do this right, you've got to keep your hip elevated, whatever you set
it at should be parallel there to the rest of your body.
Your whole Torso should be in one line, from your leg and your ankle all the way up to
your shoulder.
You keep it there the entire time.
Now, the most important thing, the Band.
And if you're doing this in the gym, it doesn't matter if you don't have a Band, you can use
a Cable machine to do this exact same exercise.
I was just wanted to show you the home equivalent by using just a Resistant Band.
Here, when you look at it from the top, you can see that, if I pull the Band, now I've
got a balance component front to back.
Am I allowing the momentum of the Band to actually rock me back into a Posterior Rotation
here?
If I do, then I'm not doing the exercises right.
Anti-rotation is one of the biggest jobs of our Core.
And you can see that with every pull, it's enough of a disrupting pattern to my Core
strength, that it knocks me over or it pulls me forward when I go back.
You don't want either of these.
So this exercises is great for testing us and our strength in all three of these Planes.
And also helping us to build our strength in all three of these Planes.
And guess what, like I said, you can do it with just one move.
So who knew Ab Training was all that complicated?
Actually guys it really isn't.
But you have to understand the function of your Core and you have to make sure that you're
working it through all of it's functions.
It's not just three functions.
There's a lot of things that we can do with our Abs that a lot of people don't know about.
We should be doing, Top Down movements, Midrange movements, Bottom Up movements, Bottom Up
Rotation, Top Down Rotation, Anti Rotation,
there's a lot of different functions of the Abs.
The cool thing is we can work them in a much more consolidated way if we know the right
exercises to do.
I've already laid that all out for you guys, I've done all that ground work.
As a PT, this is what we specialize in.
Having you do exercises in all three Planes of Motion so we can get you more bang for
your buck.
Get you in and out in a much faster time and get you a better Core at the end of the day.
If you're looking for a program where I've already laid it all out for you, on top of
the fact that I'm covering all of your other workouts to help you train like an athlete,
not just right here but to train your whole body,
then head to ATHLEANX.COM and get our ATHLEANX Training System.
In the meantime, make sure, Washboard Wednesday here, tell me what else it is that you want
me to cover here on these videos,
and I'll make sure that I cover the cool related topic that you want to see.
In the meantime, if you found this video helpful and you're going to try this exercise out,
make sure you leave your comments and a thumbs up below and I'll be back here again in just
a few days with yet another video.
Alright guys, I'll see you soon.