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Dynamic Chop Pattern

Dynamic Chop Pattern is a compound movement that combines strength, stability, and mobility, making it a popular choice among fitness enthusiasts and athletes. This exercise mimics the motion of swinging an axe or chopping wood, hence its name, and primarily targets the core muscles while engaging various other muscle groups. Start with feet shoulder width or just wider than shoulder width apart, grabbing the resistance over the shoulder on the same side as the resistance, and press the resistance down past the opposite hip. While pressing down with the arms, rotate around the leg opposite the side of the resistance, by pivoting and pushing through the ball of the foot of the leg on the same side as the resistance. The motion is down, diagonal and forward.

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Transcript

00:00 - 00:04This is Brent, coming at you with another core exercise, a dynamic strength
00:04 - 00:08training exercise for the core. The ax-chop. This is one of my absolute
00:08 - 00:14favorites for marrying the anterior, and posterior, oblique subsystem, something
00:14 - 00:19very important for all of my athletes who need rotational strength. Now, I will
00:19 - 00:23admit, this exercise is hard to teach. It's hard to queue. It's not easy to
00:23 - 00:28get everybody doing all of the little tiny things that will help you get the
00:28 - 00:32most out of this exercise. My friend, Mike Tierney, from Metropolitan Fitness,
00:32 - 00:36is going to help me demonstrate. Now, first things first, a little setup. We have
00:36 - 00:39to be able to place some resistance above somebody's head. You can use a
00:39 - 00:44resistance band, you can use a cable, but it needs to be up high. Now, Mike is about
00:44 - 00:48a foot back from that resistance, and a couple of feet off to the side, and that'll
00:48 - 00:52be important to create the direction of force that we need. We're going to set up
00:52 - 00:55his kinetic chain check points. I want him starting in a really good posture: head
00:55 - 01:00back, chin tucked, he's got his shoulders back, he's drawn-in for me. The
01:00 - 01:04only difference is, for a chop, since we're going through rotation, we actually
01:04 - 01:07need to be slightly wider than hip width with the feet. The feet are still going to
01:07 - 01:11point forward, but they're probably going to be closer to shoulder width, or just
01:11 - 01:15wider than shoulder width. Now as far as the grip, I'm going to have Mike go over
01:15 - 01:19there and grab the handles, and notice that the first thing Mike does, is
01:19 - 01:22he doesn't grab inside the handles. Can you show them grabbing inside the
01:22 - 01:26handles? So if you grab inside the handles, what ends up happening is, as you
01:26 - 01:31twist your hands, and as you twist through this movement, this tends to rub the top
01:31 - 01:34of the knuckles, and as the weight increases this actually can become quite
01:34 - 01:38painful. So, what I'm gonna have Mike do is actually grab from the outside. Not
01:38 - 01:41only does it make it a little easier to grip, but it might actually get us a
01:41 - 01:45little benefit in grip strength. He's going to start in this position, and I
01:45 - 01:48know there's a lot of different ways to go through a chop pattern with your arms,
01:48 - 01:54what I tend to like best for my clients and athletes, is kind of a pushing
01:54 - 01:59pattern. You're going to start here, and then push through to palms facing the
01:59 - 02:03floor, almost doing that old-school tricep extension, but with a
02:03 - 02:08twist. I'm gonna have Mike show us that, go ahead and do that Mike. Great! And
02:08 - 02:12you feel like you can hold a lot of weight here right? -I do. Now, since I use
02:12 - 02:14this as a dynamic strength exercise, and I'm going to probably
02:14 - 02:19increase load to progress, it's very important that I get the strongest grip,
02:19 - 02:24the most comfortable grip for an increase in load, that I possibly can, and
02:24 - 02:29I find that this is it. So, let's go ahead and go back, nice and slow. Good. The next
02:29 - 02:34little joint system that I want to look at is the lumbar spine, or the trunk. In
02:34 - 02:39the lumbar spine, or trunk, he's actually doing an oblique crunch, so
02:39 - 02:43that's flexion with rotation. Hopefully if you have been working on your
02:43 - 02:46progressions, you've been thinking ahead a little bit, you've already taught a
02:46 - 02:51crunch, maybe a crunch on a ball, an oblique crunch, an oblique crunch on a
02:51 - 02:56ball, so that motor program is at least up here somewhere. We know that once we
02:56 - 03:00start to queue it, it's not totally new. So Mike, let's go ahead and do the push
03:00 - 03:07through, as well as make sure we show off that flexion and rotation at the spine.
03:07 - 03:12Good. Now from an anatomical standpoint, you guys can see here he's got external
03:12 - 03:16obliques working, but instead of that oblique crunch that we were doing, that
03:16 - 03:20just worked the trunk muscles, now we're getting the whole subsystem involved
03:20 - 03:25because his adductor on the opposite leg also has to work, which is our anterior
03:25 - 03:31oblique subsystem. That external oblique, abdominal fascia, contralateral adductor.
03:31 - 03:35You can go ahead and go back. A really important subsystem for pushing and
03:35 - 03:40stabilizing posterior forces against us, as well as turning in the kinetic chain.
03:40 - 03:45So, I want you guys to visualize that subsystem, and then watch Mike do this
03:45 - 03:52exercise again. Good, Mike. Now the next step - you can go ahead and go back nice
03:52 - 03:56and slow - the next step is where my chop might differ a little bit from some of
03:56 - 03:59the chops you've seen in the gym. I've seen some people go for as much flexion
03:59 - 04:03as they possibly can. I use this to get a little bit more drive out of the glutes,
04:03 - 04:08and integrate the posterior oblique subsystem as well. So rather than just
04:08 - 04:12let Mike collapse down this way, I'm actually going to get him to try to
04:12 - 04:17drive through his outside leg, keep the balls of his feet, or those
04:17 - 04:22metatarsal heads, from first to five, on the floor, so that he's actually twisting,
04:22 - 04:27but then pushing and driving through keeping this glute engaged. So
04:27 - 04:30let's let's show that off as much as we possibly can. We're going to push
04:30 - 04:37through, oblique crunch, and drive through this glute. Good. And you notice, Mike does
04:37 - 04:41a really good job here, his glutes are really tight. All of the ball of his
04:41 - 04:46foot is on the floor, and he's pushing through really hard. Now, Mike is a
04:46 - 04:49baseball player, as you can imagine - you can go back nice and slow, I won't make you hold
04:49 - 04:55that - you can imagine, as a pitcher and as a batter, he not only will get the power
04:55 - 05:00from his anterior oblique subsystem, but now he gets to use his glute to
05:00 - 05:06drive through, and your glute's the biggest muscle in your body, these aren't. This is
05:06 - 05:12power here, but this is even more power. So let's see one more of those. Good. So
05:12 - 05:19this is ax-chop, plus posterior oblique subsystem. Notice his foot
05:19 - 05:22position. What I'm going to try to do, and you can see he's turned out just a
05:22 - 05:25little bit here, so let's go back really nice and slow, bring your feet back
05:25 - 05:30together just a little bit, good. And you will have to do that. As the feet
05:30 - 05:33are kind of, twisting this way, they have a tendency to shift out a little
05:33 - 05:37bit. So, going through all of our checkpoints here, from head to feet,
05:37 - 05:43he's going to go from hand position here, to hand position here, oblique crunch,
05:43 - 05:49drive through the glute, and then foot position, ideally, would create a 90
05:49 - 05:52degree angle. He's going to be pushing through that back foot, which is going to
05:52 - 05:58create a 90 degree angle this way, to this foot that stays planted.
05:58 - 06:06Let's see all of that together. Great stuff Mike. The last queue,
06:06 - 06:09that I should have mentioned earlier, is I also want him to come back nice and
06:09 - 06:13slowly. I don't want him to just let go, I want to take advantage of that eccentric
06:13 - 06:19phase. So, how would I progress this exercise? Well, stability progressions for
06:19 - 06:24a dynamic chop aren't as easy to come by, but as a strength exercise I am not shy
06:24 - 06:30about increasing the resistance. I would love to get Mike up to a heavier band, get
06:30 - 06:33him onto the cable column, and maybe even keep that rep range in more of a
06:33 - 06:37strength rep range, like 8 to 12. Once he could do 12, with really good form,
06:37 - 06:41I'm going to up the weight again. If you aren't familiar with the subsystems,
06:41 - 06:45try checking out my articles on the blog. Would love for you to
06:45 - 06:49understand how this works together. Those subsystems do a much better job at
06:49 - 06:53predicting optimal exercise selection, than looking at these muscles
06:53 - 06:57individually. I hope you enjoyed this video and I hope you get a ton of
06:57 - 07:00performance out of this exercise.

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