Side Plank

Side Plank is an exercise that challenges your strength, coordination and balance. It requires you to hold your body in a sideways-facing push-up position, with your elbow bent and your feet together. This exercise targets your entire core, including your obliques and transverse abdominis, and helps to improve overall stability. It's an effective way to work your core muscles, as well as your elbows, shoulders, forearms and wrists.

Transcript

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This is Brent, President of B2C Fitness, discussing
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the side plank, yet another great core exercise.
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Most individuals do this exercise for their external obliques, or their waistline, but
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truthfully this is an incredible exercise for integrating our glute medius into our
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core work.
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So that's what we're going to focus on with Vinnie here, who's going to help us demonstrate
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this exercise.
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We do have to make a couple of slight modifications to this exercise, to really enhance the glute
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medius activation we get out of it.
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So Vinnie here is going to assume the position on one elbow.
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We're still going to mind our kinetic chain checkpoints.
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So once he gets into position here, we'll start in this position, his head is going
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to be back, his chin tucked and level, everything is pretty good there.
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We're still going to make sure he's drawn-in, and his spine is straight.
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We're going to have him, to increase glute activation, squeeze his glutes, and drive
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his hips forward.
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Now, this would be a wonderful way to start a side plank, but since Vinnie is fairly advanced,
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we're going to go ahead and take this up a notch.
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I'm going to have him straighten this leg out, keeping it off the floor, so that he
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is stabilizing completely with his glute medius.
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Now we can progress this exercise further, but this is already very challenging and holding
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this for even 30 seconds would be an incredible accomplishment.
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We're going to have Vinnie go to the straight leg version though.
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Same thing with the straight leg version, we can have one leg stacked on top of the
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other, but realize, if we do that, we are going to get the adductor of the top leg involved,
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and we want to focus on glute medius activation.
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So I'm going to have Vinnie go ahead, once again, and raise this leg.
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Again, holding this for 30 seconds would be quite a bear, but then we can go one step
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further and have him do a side lying leg raise and make this slightly more dynamic on
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top of it. Go ahead and relax, Vinnie.