What I want to look at today are anti-rotation exercises. Now, many people are familiar with kind of standard band exercises or other anti-rotation exercises in a gym using a cable machine. We love them because one of the key things that your brain needs in order to move well is midline stability.
So I want to take you through a simple anti-rotation progression using one band, one attachment point that doesn’t require a lot of room or a lot of movement that you can use to really increase the stability requirements for your midline. So the standard exercise that we teach, I’m using right now what is called a Pat Band from Flexvit. I’m going to look down at my feet and make sure that I’m in a semi-comfortable athletic position. My feet are a little bit spread, I feel nice and stable. I hold the band to my midline and I simply push it out. Alright, so I’m going to just do that 10 or 15 seconds. Nice little isometric contraction or I can add some movement to it.
The way that we increase the intensity here is not by changing the band pull or by changing the intensity of the band, but instead by changing our body position. So the next thing that we’re going to do is we’re going to go to a narrow stance. You will immediately notice it if you put your feet together and you begin that same pushing out process with the band, the intensity of the exercise is going to go up significantly. You’ll feel yourself working a lot harder. So we begin in kind of a comfortable athletic neutral stance. Then we go feet together. We repeat that same 10 or 15 seconds worth of work. From there we want to go into a tandem stance.
So now I’m going to put my left foot in front of my right foot. My toe is touching my heel. I try and get up nice and strong and lengthen the spine. And once again, I start to go through my press and you notice that I’m having to slow down considerably because the perturbation from the band is making my midline work harder in order to maintain balance. So that was my left foot forward. Now I need to go right foot forward. So once again, I get into position, I press out with the band and either do my isometric hold or go through some different repetitions. Just pushing the band out and pulling it in. From there, we want to try a version of a single-leg stance. All right, so I go back to my feet together position. What you will notice with the band to my right. If I push out, I will probably be fairly comfortable lifting my left leg. I’ll be working really hard.
