New Video: Core Exercises with TRX or Gymnastics Rings
A simple equipment addition for great core exercise application and more uses
Reminder: It’s the final two days of the early rate discount for The Conference for Rowing Coaches on December 8-10 in Saratoga Springs, NY. Save $50 on registration, reserve your workshop sessions early, and get the group rate at host hotel Saratoga Hilton until November 15. The organizers have also recently added a “Women in Coaching Chat” event from 4-5pm on Friday with coaches Bebe Bryans, Tessa Spilane, Andriel Doolittle and Clare Doyle. All details at the conference website here.
Today’s new video…
Commonly referred to together as “suspension trainers,” a TRX trainer or gymnastics ring setup is one of my top recommended equipment items for those strength training from a home gym or with the ability to request equipment for a commercial gym, weight-room, or boathouse. Similar to resistance bands, suspension trainers are low cost, portable and require very little storage space, and open up a whole lot of exercises for a strength training program. They don’t wear out, and the loading potential is higher for bodyweight exercises than resistance bands. Bands are great, but if I have to choose one, I’ll have the TRX or gym rings first.
One of the best uses for suspension trainers is core exercises. Regular readers know that the seated rockback is my #1 core exercise for rowers. My typical core training is one session per week of seated rockbacks and another session of suspension trainer exercises, as well as an exercise or two in the warmup and whatever else the rowers do on their own. We have rings at Craftsbury and use a variety of exercises, covered in my new video with voiceover explaining what I’m thinking about and coaching.
What these core exercises offer is some combination of stable spine with stable or mobile hip and instability at the shoulder due to the connection with the rings. The seated rockback gets the stable spine, mobile hip to train for rowing’s unique lower torso demands, but doesn’t integrate the shoulder to the “core system” of hip, torso, and shoulder the same way.
I prefer suspension trainer exercises to crunches or sit-ups and ground-based plank exercises. Crunches and sit-ups are irrelevant to rowing as a movement, and often a low back injury risk from repetitive loaded spinal flexion and extension. Planks are fine for introductory training, but soon run out of challenge and benefit past the ~45-second hold point. I’ve coached athletes who can crush long sets of crunches and situps and ground-based planks for 2+ minutes really struggle to do even a 15-second ring plank, let alone more challenging variations with dynamic movement.
Suspension trainer core exercise progression:
Front Plank Hold
1-Arm Walking
Alternating Walking
1-Arm Stir-the-Pot
1-Ring Fallout
2-Ring Fallout
2-Ring Stir-the-Pot
Progressions in Time, Height, and Variation
We can progress these in movement challenge by going from #1 to #7 as appropriate for the athlete. We can also progress by decreasing handle height to make each variation harder. Begin around waist-height and decrease from there to increase challenge. We can also progress through time under tension. I usually write these exercises in sets and times, like so:
Week 1: 3 sets of 15 seconds
Week 2: 4 sets of 12 seconds
Week 3: 3 sets of 20 seconds
Week 4: 4 sets of 15 seconds
Week 5: 15 seconds, 20 seconds, 30 seconds
Week 6: 4 sets of 20 seconds
Week 7: 3 sets of 30 seconds
Exercise Technique Keys
We have a triple progression system here of handle height, exercise variation, and time under tension, so there’s plenty to work with to keep these exercises challenging and effective for athletes of all levels. Train with good technique, and terminate the set if spinal movement creeps into the exercise via flexion (rounding) or extension (arching), or if the shoulder start to shrug up and shift the load into the upper trapezius muscles.
Another key is to breathe deeply into the low abdominals. I find that a lot of rowers hold their breath during abdominal training or breathe shallowly into the chest. This is a lose-lose problem. First, we do an aerobic sport, so we definitely don’t want to race with breath-holding, and therefore we don’t want to train that way either. Second, breath-holding reduces engagement of the core muscles that we actually do use during rowing and erging. Holding the breath while training teaches the rower to lock everything together to create stability, and fails to develop stability without locking everything together. We then have no stability when we try to go to the performance environment where things cannot be locked together.
These exercises are part of my rowing strength training to train hip, torso, and shoulder coordination separately. We need to be able to move these bodyparts independently in the simpler environment of strength training to then learn how to effectively combine them in the more complex sport environment for best performance. Athletes tell me they’ve felt great benefit in their technique and ability to make adjustments by training these parts to move independently, rather than hips, torso, and shoulders always being stuck in combination due to habit or lack of training this element of coordination and strength.
I just did core exercises in this new video, but we can also use suspension trainers for several other exercises as well, including pushups, bodyweight rows, chin-up variations, shoulder face-pulls and reverse-fly, hamstring curls, and more. These all offer the benefit of productive instability at the hands or feet via the suspension system compared to their barbell or ground-based counterparts, without becoming so unstable so as to just challenge athlete balance alone.
