The strength of your core may be the most important trait of a strong, athletic body, and will benefit you in so many ways.
You’ll be less prone to injury, you’ll hit bigger numbers on your lifts and you’ll massively improve your stability and your posture.
In a sport setting, you’ll greatly improve your sprinting mechanics, your cutting abilities, your force absorption and a ton more.
So I’m going to give you three of the BEST core strengthening exercises you need to be doing right now.
V-Up Press
So when it comes to core strengthening movements, we’re going to leave out the sit ups and the Russian twists and the side bends.
And we’re going to replace all those movements with those that will challenge our core stability while performing dynamic movements. With this movement, we’re going to hold the v-up position with locked out legs and dorsiflexed ankles.
While holding this position we’ll be pressing dumbbells in an overhead range of motion.
I like super-setting this movement with a lower body lift like a back squat for 8-10 reps.
Pallof Press
So here we have the same goal as the v-up press: keep our core under control while performing a dynamic movement, except now we’re going to be focusing on our anti-rotational capabilities.
With this exercise we can use a cable or a band that’s attempting to rotate us towards the anchor point. And we’re going to resist this movement as we press the band in a straight line in front of us.
I even like to add a variation to this movement where we add a raise overhead at the end as we lock out our arms.
Suitcase Carry
Same goal here as the first two exercises: stable core with a dynamic movement, but now we’re in the frontal plane.
As we carry load in one hand while the other side is unloaded, it should be obvious that the weight on our loaded side will attempt to take our spine out of alignment and make us dip to the side.
We’re resisting this movement through keeping a stable trunk to stay upright as we walk for a certain prescribed distance.
This exercise can be progressed by either increasing the weight we’re carrying or the distance we’re walking.
The movement can also be progressed by changing what instrument we’re holding in our hand. Once we’ve mastered the kettlebell, we can move to a barbell.
In this way we’re challenging two planes of motion at a time.
If you want to watch our full-length video on this topic, click here.
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