Keep it simple: the inchworm

Are you searching or hoping for profound insight to make your sport or exercise better; to help you produce results?  If that’s the approach you’re trying to take, you are looking at things the wrong way.  Take another look at what you’re already doing and ask yourself if it is in fact even ‘basic’.  Basic choices answer important questions (what are my work-ons or deficits?) or deliver critical outcomes (what motor abilities relate to my goal)?  Much of what stands for common practice in exercise (and sport) is muddled and confused.  Not basic, in that it addresses something fundamental, and not strategic and advancing, either. 

There are only three pieces to the physical and athletic development equation:

1. Structural health and capacity – postural control and healthy, happy muscles and joints
2. Basic motor/ movement skill development – simple movements that provide the foundation for complex skills
3. Contextualized or specialised skills and capacities, e.g. sports or specialised environments

An exercise can meet more than one need, but your program should contain tasks in at least two of the three categories (i.e. 1 and 2).  At Sport Performance, we complete comprehensive warm-ups before the ‘meat’ of the session begins and one of our favourite warm-up exercises is the ‘inchworm’:

Figure 1. The inchworm

The inchworm is comprehensively challenging: shoulder and core strength, stretching of the hamstrings and calves/ Achilles and, critically, full body organisation – it’s a demanding skill, and that makes it an ideal warm-up choice.  The inchworm is also scalable.  We use single leg, medicine ball, and reverse action variations.

Few exercises are as simple and comprehensive, and that’s the point.  The targets are obvious and meaningful.  Ensure you can say the same thing about your conditioning program.