Last week I wrote a post about the importance of the external obliques in pelvic control.  If you missed it, check it out HERE.  Now I wanted to give you a couple drills and exercises you can use to improve the recruitment of the external obliques in pelvic control.

The exercises that follow are not all extremely difficult to perform.  It’s more about focusing on performing them the right way.  The pelvis should be neutral throughout the entire movement and as you as you feel your back arching, it’s generally a sign that you’re losing the external obliques engagement.  These exercises are by no means the only ones that exist to attain better recruitment of your external obliques in pelvic control, but it’s definitely a good place to start if you have no clue how to achieve that.

The first one is probably the most basic one.  It’s a variation of an exercise that comes from Shirley Sahrmann’s book Diagnosis and Treatment of Movement Impairment Syndromes.  The goal is maintain a very slight arch in your lower back throughout the whole movement.  To engage your external obliques as much as possible, you can keep your fingers above your illiac crest on both sides; palpation always helps to feel the right muscles doing their work.

The second one is a little similar, and also a variation of the deadbug exercises.  My colleague Matt Siniscalchi posted this one on his website last week.  I believe that Craig Liebenson or Bill Hartman might have come up with this one.  Again, the goal is to maintain a very slight arch in the lower back and make sure the arch is not increasing as your lowering your legs.  The press against the wall will also favor some inner core activity throughout the movement.

The last one is definitely much harder than the previous two.  I don’t recommend you try it until you’ve mastered the first 2.  It’s basically a leg lowering exercise, but because of the weight of the lower extremities it makes it much harder to keep the neutral pelvis and the external obliques activation.  Again the goal is to maintain a very slight arch in the lower back and make sure yo don’t lose it.

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I’ve written a lot about core training and different core exercises in the past.  But one thing that’s really important to consider with core exercises is that you just can’t use anyone randomly with any athlete or client.  It is fair to say that we should use progressions with our core exercises, at least with beginners; start them with more simple and basic exercises and progress them to more challenging variations.  You should do that with all your core exercises from the different groups: anti-flexion, anti-extension, anti-rotation, anti-lateral flexion and inner core exercises.  Today, I want to focus on anti-extension, or the anterior core group.

- The first most basic progression for most would be, with no big suprise, the front plank.

The front plank is a basic bodyweight exercise that requires to maintain a straight line throughout your body and keep a neutral spine position.  This is also the goal of most other progressions, but the front plank plank does that without additional challenges.

- The second progression would be the stability ball front plank.  Once someone has mastered the front plank and can hold it for over a minute, you can progress them to the stability ball version.  The biggest difference with the stability ball front plank is that the surface on which you place your elbows is unstable, which in turn will require a greater activation from your core muscles to maintain the proper position.

- The third one is a similar variation from the stability ball front plank.  Once that position is mastered, you can incorporate mini-rollouts with the same position on the ball to make it more challenging.  Once again the goal is to maintain a neutral spine and keeping the belly tight even if we added movement.

- The slideboard bodysaw would be the next progression following the stability ball minirollouts.

The effect is pretty much the same because your points of contact on the ground further away from each other (elbows and feet), but this time since your moving your whole body away it makes the slideboard bodysaw much more difficult.

- The last one, but not the least, is the ab wheel rollout.  This implement has been around forever, but I fell like it is not appreciated enough.  When done correctly the ab wheel rollout is one of the most difficult anterior core exercise of all.  You need to be really strong in order to maintain a neutral spine throughout a full range of motion.  And to push things a little further, when you’ve mastered the ab wheel rollout, you can do it band-resisted:

There are many other variations of anti-extension core exercises we use with our athletes at Endeavor, but hopefully this gave you an idea of how progress anterior core exercises.

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