Movement Challenge – Day Five

Movement Challenge – Day Five:  Today the focus is on strengthening the core. It is important to not only have joint mobility but to also have a stable platform to move around. This fundamental exercise has many modifications to help you get started and progress to more difficult movements. Continue to increase your steps and keep practicing the movements from Days 1, 2, 3, and 4.

This is Day 5 of the movement challenge. Today we are going to focus on activating our core, and we’re going to do this by learning how to do a plank correctly. Keep in mind in order to learn how to do this plank correctly, we have to learn how to breathe correctly, and we talked about that at the beginning of the challenge. We need to take those nice deep belly breaths to activate that core, and then we build on that strength by doing a plank. So one of the important things about mobility. We’ve been working on a lot of motion, which is one of the main parts about being mobile. The other part is about being stable, and that’s what the plank is going to really do. It’s going to create this stable platform where your spine and your body feels comfortable moving. Because if you don’t have stability moving, then your motion patterns aren’t going to be safe and they aren’t going to be correct. We’ll have Dr. Perkins demonstrate this plank, and what we want to do is make sure we have what we call a neutral back. So you don’t want your back to be bowing, and we don’t want your back to be swaying. We want it to be a nice neutral back. As you breathe you want to really tighten that core, and feel that burn. You should feel that all through the midsection. So first we are going to start by having Dr. Perkins come down on the floor again, and she’s going to get basically in the pushup position. For some people, this will be their plank. Just getting into this position will be fairly difficult. Notice she has a nice level back. It’s not bowing, it’s not arching. We want that. And she’s going to breathe, she’s going to feel that, and she’s going to tighten the whole core. For those of you, however, who can go beyond this, now she’s going to go up on her toes and go straight. And again, we have this nice straight line, we’re going to have the low back neutral. She’s very stable. And she’s going to hold this until she starts to shake or until she starts to lose this structure in her low back. So if she starts to dip or starts to sway, then we want to stop. We want to come back into this neutral position like this right here because it doesn’t help us to practice movement patterns that are faulty. So once she does that, she can go ahead and do that again. You can do that until you aren’t even doing a plank anymore. If that was okay, and you’re good with that, and you can do that for 45 seconds to a minute, the way to make it a little more difficult, is to come into the same position, come down on your elbows, and then come up on your toes. You’re going to find that this is a more challenging position. You should feel that much more, not just in your abs, but your obliques and the other muscles around your trunk. We’re really trying to strengthen the core muscles. So again, that’s perfect. Then she would come down as she starts to get tired. And she comes up correctly. Now she’s back into one of our starting positions. A good straight spine and everything else. So then if that were too difficult and if you cannot get on the floor, there is another modification that we can do, especially if you have any shoulder injuries or a previous back injury. You can actually start this movement on the wall. You can start here, and if this is okay, you can actually lower yourself down on to your elbows on the wall, and you’e still doing the exact same thing. Neutral spine, breathing properly, really tightening up the core and you can feel that as you do it. As this becomes easier and easier, you can move down, go to a table, you can go to a chair, and eventually you can go to the floor that way. This is a great way to start strengthening the muscles around the spinal cord and it will help you to gain stability as well as motion. So I hope these work for you guys, and we will see you for day six.