0:00 This is Brent from the Brookbush Institute coming at you with progressions of a very common exercise, a 0:05 common exercise I don't actually advocate that often. That's the crunch! 0:08 However, when you progress it to a ball crunch, all of a sudden we have this 0:13 exercise that becomes incredibly versatile, as well as doing something 0:18 very important, which is marry our posterior and anterior oblique 0:22 subsystems and function. I'm going to have my friend, Mike, come out. Mike's 0:29 going to show these exercises. I'm going to torture him for about the next five 0:34 minutes, but I think he's ready for it! Now, I know a ball crunch is a 0:39 progression from a floor crunch, but I think this is a progression that you 0:42 can get into fairly quickly. If you've been doing ball bridges, this should not 0:48 be that hard of a progression. Mike is going to go ahead and lay back on the 0:51 ball, but unlike a ball crunch where I had put the ball right between his 0:55 shoulder blades, this time I want it more on his low back. He's going to have his 1:00 upper glutes just touching the ball, and it's actually the fact that he can get 1:06 his glutes up, all of a sudden makes this version of a crunch 1:10 not so bad. If he has his glutes engaged, I know his iliacus and psoas are 1:18 reciprocally inhibited, which means now he has to use that anterior oblique 1:23 subsystem, and he can't cheat with hip flexor dominance. So, all of a sudden, just 1:28 having somebody keeping glute lock-out, and do a simple crunch, 1:33 and things are not so easy. I think if you really focus, think, 1:39 dollar bill between your cheeks, draw in, and come up, a lot of you guys are going 1:45 to be shaking and this, functionally, doesn't become such a bad 1:48 exercise. Mike here is a pitcher, think about what the throwing motion 1:52 requires. A push off from the leg, with rotation, and flexion from the trunk. So 1:57 our first progression could be flexion, with a little bit of rotation, while 2:01 keeping this glue lock-out. So we're teaching 2:06 his posterior and anterior oblique subsystem to come together a bit here. 2:11 Now, from those progressions, if he can maintain his glute lock-out for a full 2:15 set, I can start progressing in weight, I can start progressing in complexity or I 2:22 can start progressing in a way that I'm going to show you guys, where we can work 2:25 on some dynamic flexibility of the upper body. We're also going to show you 2:30 guys some reactive drills that are a lot of fun. Now, first things first, let's 2:35 talk about weight. There's no limit to how big of a medicine ball you can grab. 2:40 You could even use a dumbbell, providing the glutes stay tight. One of the 2:46 mistakes I see a lot of people making in core exercise in general, is our rep 2:50 range. It's 12 to 20 reps for strength to endurance. If you're doing more than 20 2:54 reps, it's cardio, and the crunch is not a great selection for cardiovascular 2:59 exercise. So, let's keep going. If this wasn't heavy enough for him, I'd just go 3:03 get a bigger ball, or I could continue to progress the exercise in a different way. 3:07 One thing I don't see enough of is people saying "hey, let's let's start putting some different 3:13 forces on your core and get you working against a rotational force, or against a 3:18 longer lever arm". So first, we could start back here, this is also working on some 3:23 dynamic flexibility of his lats, and then he can come up, and that's a lot harder. 3:27 Now, why not in a symmetrical force? Let's go ahead and put one hand down, and now 3:36 he has something trying to rotate him this way, and then if I want to make it 3:39 really tough, we were trying this before, I'll have them scoot this way 3:43 towards the wall a little bit, 3:48 and he can go one hand, but out into a P and F carry way. Now he has all of that 3:55 load try to flip him right off the ball, and of course he can come up back into 4:00 his crunch, or maybe even his crunch with rotation. So I could have him come out 4:04 there, and then as long as he keeps his glutes locked out, have him reach for my 4:08 hand here. Good. I think you can see, just progressing in these different ways 4:13 with weight, if he got all of these down, I can put them all together as a 4:18 dynamic flexibility warm up. This could be the core exercise in that integrated 4:24 warm up before he does any of his activity. He could start back, and then he 4:28 could just follow a clock with his arm. Now he's got 12 o'clock, and then 4:35 we're going to go back this way, good, and then back this way. Now 4:44 we have all of the different fibers of the pectoralis. We have some pec minor in 4:47 there. All of these different things are getting 4:52 stretched out, working on that dynamic control at a tempo a little closer to 4:56 the sport, which of course, in Mike's case, is baseball. I'm going to go ahead 5:01 and let you sit up for a second, take a rest from here. A lot of the things I 5:05 like to do involve power, or a little bit of that reactivity. A crunch and catch is 5:11 a very important exercise if you guys are going to have anybody do that ground 5:16 smash power exercise. It's probably important to at least get their core 5:21 strong enough, make sure we're getting good TVA activation, make sure they can 5:25 control a crunch and catch first, and then Mike and I are going to play a 5:31 little game to work on his reactivity. Just another great warm-up, pre-sport, for 5:36 core activity, where I'll show you how to make crunch and catch a lot 5:40 harder. Let's start two arms first and show them 5:46 tha, just a standard crunch and catch. This is the exercise, and you can, I 5:50 don't have enough room on this video, but you can stand pretty far back and 5:54 launch a ball. I would launch it over his head, this way, so that if he misses it 5:59 doesn't hit him in the face. You guys can imagine that if I took another 6:04 10 feet back, and chest passed it as hard as I could, right back behind his head, 6:09 and he had to catch it and throw it back, it's going to be great preparation for 6:14 a maximum power exercise like that ground smash. Now, if I'm just doing this 6:18 reactive stabilization exercise as a warm-up, we can start thinking about 6:24 going to one hand. This is a little bit of coordination, a little bit of 6:29 reactivity. I know my personal trainers out there don't have all 6:34 athletes as clients, so to make somebody catch with their non-dominant hand can be 6:39 quite a fun routine. With Mike, since he is a very high-level 6:45 athlete, I don't have to be nice. So if I want to work on his reactivity, his 6:49 ability to catch, I can say 'okay, I'm not going to tell them which hand, and I'm 6:55 just going to throw it anywhere within his reach to make sure, 7:04 maybe even try to fool him a little bit, just to get him 7:11 to react to that ball'. You can imagine after 3 sets of 20, after he's done 7:16 all of his other activation exercises, and then follows this up with some sub 7:20 system integration, he'll be warm, he'll be ready to go. I hope you enjoyed this video, 7:25 I hope you see some new things to do with the crunch. I'll talk to you 7:28 soon.
