Suspension Row and Progressions

Suspension Row and Progressions is a comprehensive fitness program designed to strengthen your body through both short and long intervals. The program focuses on developing whole-body fitness and conditioning, allowing users to progress from one level to the next with their own personal fitness goals. With its combination of high intensity movements and innovative exercises, users will experience increased strength, power, mobility and flexibility, as well as improved cardiorespiratory endurance. Suspension Row and Progressions can be adapted to any

Transcript

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This is Brent and in this video we're going
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over
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progressions for a very common movement pattern, the row, that many of us use for back.
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We're going to use the suspension trainer to start developing a
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progression that would fit perfectly in that stability endurance or strength
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endurance phase of our training. I'm going to have my friend, Melissa, come out.
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She's going to help me demonstrate. Now, before Melissa gets started here, one
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thing that I think people forget a little bit when they start using a
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suspension trainer is just because we put a new piece of equipment in our hand,
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doesn't change optimal
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form for the human body. So, melissa is going to grab the True Fit here, she's going
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to lean back, and the first thing we're going to notice is her posture looks good.
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Her posture looks good, just as it would be for a weighted row, cable row, if she was
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doing a cable chest press. It's generally the same posture, which is
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head back, chin tucked, neck in alignment with the rest of her back. You notice
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her shoulders are down and stable, she's drawn in, her pelvis is neutral. If she
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had gone into an anterior pelvic tilt, I could say draw in, tuck under. Her
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quads are nice and tight, knees nearly locked, and her feet are parallel to one
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another and hip width. She's got that nice posture that we've used on every other
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exercise by now, just like every other row that we've done. She's going to pull and
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pinch her shoulder blades down and back. Let's see a few of those.
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What you'll notice is Melissa's form looks good throughout. She's pinching those shoulder
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blades but not doing this thing. This is this I am trying to pull too far,
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compensation. We want to make sure that shoulder blades go down and back, not up and back.
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Go ahead and relax for a second. And if I was Melissa's trainer, the first thing I
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would notice is that's too easy. So now we have to start thinking about how we
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progress this exercise, and there's a lot of ways to progress with a suspension
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trainer. We could start with maybe one leg, so we'll go two legs to one leg.
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One leg.
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Just make sure on that leg that she's using, that that glute's tight, her hips
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staying up and forward, she's not sagging at all. Does that make it a little
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tougher? Do you want to switch legs?
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Make sure you do both sides. Just because we're working on the back,
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doesn't mean we can't gain a little stability in the hip, but you want to
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work on both sides.
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Relax for a second. Still looks too easy. So we got two legs, one leg. Could we
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go two legs, one arm? You guys do have to be careful with this one, because,
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obviously, when she goes from two arms to one arm with something like a suspension
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trainer, she's also going to double the load. I might need to move her feet
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back just a little bit.
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You'll notice that the hard thing about this particular progression is people
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want to do all sorts of rotating at the trunk. They have a hard time retracting
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their scapulae. You've got to make sure that just because we went from
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two arms to one arm, we don't let go of any of those form cues. We have to keep
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just as strict, otherwise we've just gone too far in our progessions. Alright, relax for a
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second. So we went from two legs to one leg, two arms to one arm. Could we go
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one leg, one arm? We're going to try one of these cross-body patterns. Generally,
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when I go one leg, one arm, I try to do contralateral limbs, so she's going to
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use her left leg to stabilize, we're going to pull the right arm, and then vice
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versa. When she goes to left arm, I'm going to use her right leg to stabilize. You guys
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will find that this is real tough to maintain scapular retraction, real tough
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to maintain square shoulders, square hips. Is that tough?
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Aright, we're getting there. We're getting close. If I'm in a stability endurance or
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strength endurance phase, my goal is to get her to fail in 12 to 20 repetitions
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at a slow tempo. We're getting pretty close. I think she would be just about there. So
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what can I do to even further progress this? Well, an easy progression
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is to add an unstable environment. Be careful when you add unstable
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environments, like an airex pad. We don't want her sliding, her feet sliding out
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from underneath her. Let's go two legs, one arm on an airex pad.
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Alright.
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Let's go one foot, one arm on an airex pad.
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And you notice Melissa keeps her form. Well, almost. We're starting to break down
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a little bit here. Good, relax for a second. So, I do think the fitness
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professional population, the athletic
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training professional population, those of us who work on strength and
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conditioning, we do need a little bit more practice on the stability and
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strength side. We need more practice creating good routines. If I was working
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with Melissa, I think I would have stopped at the progression of single arm,
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single leg in a stable environment. I could see good form, but it was
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challenging, and I think she could maintain that good form for the 12 to 20
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reps I was looking to achieve to increase endurance in that phase. Now, we
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do have load progressions, so I couldn back off or increase in load
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depending on how advanced my athlete was. Melissa's going to help me demonstrate that real
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quick. So, just starting off with the handles the length they are now,
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if she moves her feet closer to where I have these hanging, she gets more
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horizontal. I
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increase the perpendicular length from my lever here, it'll actually be more force
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she has to generate to do that row. And you can see she's shaking a little
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bit. That's tough. If I wanted to go even further, but her feet are all the way
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against a bar, or they're all the way against a wall, let's say I had this hanging
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off a wall clip, what I could do is just make these longer. I could get her even more
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horizontal. Good luck.
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That's tough stuff right there.
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If I wanted to go even further, I could go completely horizontal. What we're
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actually going to do here is we're going to start with these a little bit shorter,
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but I'm going to put her feet up on something.
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In this case, we're skipping a progression here, guys, I would usually
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use a bench first, but rolling a bench into the shot was just a little awkward so
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we're going to use a stability ball instead here. You ready? Do your best. I'm going to have
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you hang down first, so almost sit down on your butt. I want you to put one heel up here.
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It helps to get the ball in a position where your heel's in the center
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of the ball so that you have a little bit of control with your legs on where
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you're putting that ball. Your feet don't have to be perfectly together either.
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Now, pull up into position,
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get nice and flat, squeeze your butt, draw in, try to get those feet
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straight for me.
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Good. Alright, let's try a couple of those. We can see- Do you want to give it one more shot?
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Give you a rest? We can see this is a little bit beyond where Melissa's at, but
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some of those other progressions from a strength standpoint, if I needed to
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increase the way to get our reps down, let's say she could do more than the 20 reps I was
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looking for, we could see maybe moving her feet in would work, or making the
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True Fit a little longer here would work.
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This is a tough progression, guys, this might be one of those challenges I put
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out: Let's see who can do 20 reps horizontal with their feet on a ball
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with two independent suspension trainers here. We're just going to try to get a
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couple. I'll give the ball a little bit of stability here. Head back, really try to
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retract those scapulae.
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Pull, pull, pull, pull, pull, down slow, down slow. One more. Good.
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Relax. Alright, guys, there you go.
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Tons of progressions, stability progressions: two feet, one foot; two arms,
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one arm. We did one arm, one foot together, so there's five progressions right there.
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Then we added unstable environments, like an airex pad, so then you can go back to
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two feet unstable, one foot unstable. Then we talked about our load
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progressions. Try to keep in mind where your fulcrum is. The more
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horizontal you get, the harder the exercise is going to be from a load
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perspective. Moving the feet in, making the straps of the True Fit longer, or as
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you saw in this last progression, which was just mean, going totally horizontal are
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all ways for you to progress this particular exercise. And as we mentioned
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towards the beginning of the video, this is the type of practice you all need, we
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all need as an industry to make our stability endurance, or strength
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endurance training just as exciting just, as challenging as the max strength
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training, the power training that's become so popular.
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Don't forget, you can't lift more than you can stabilize. I look forward to