“Cool” winds from the North bringing cooler times to Qatar over the weekend. Coolness is relative term, we’re talking 38C (at the hottest time of day) rather than 45C like last week. It is a welcome decrease though and gives us the opportunity to work all the harder at training.
Today’s session features a fair bit of cardio but we also work to develop your abdominals. An often overlooked part of the abs is the lower abs, they are hard to target but essential to a strong posture and core. An exercise worked on today is the hollow rock. So read up on it below:
The Hollow Rock
A seemingly innocuous little exercise, the hollow rock is a staple of gymnastics conditioning and excruciatingly tough when performed correctly.
To perform the hollow rock lay face up on the ground with your arms stretched overhead and legs out straight. Raise your arms and legs about one foot off the floor and attempt to assume the shape of a rocker on a rocking chair, then gently, slowly, teeter back and forth.
The critical part of this movement is to pull the lordotic curve (lumbar arch) from the back so that the entire back is rounded from shoulders to butt. Initially, you will find that the rocking is rough because of a flat spot in the lower back. This is a perfect measure of both a weakness in and inability to innervate the lower abs.
The role of the hip flexors is fairly insignificant in the hollow rock but the role of the lower rectus (lower abs) is dramatic. (Recent evidence suggests that the obliques play a major role in lumbar flexion http://www.pponline.co.uk/encyc/0689.htm)
For many people the hollow rock is so hard that no matter how hard they try they “clunk” on each rocking as they come to level and the flat spot caused by insufficient lumbar flexion smacks the floor. This “clunking” is a perfect measure of one’s lack of lower ab recruitment.
Lower ab recruitment is the toughest part of ab training and never well developed by most athletes. It is so common as to be a visual cliché that the aerobics instructor who teaches “ab classes” at your local gym can do thousands of crunches but still has a lower abdominal pooch as though three months pregnant. Activation, full recruitment, and development of the lower abs require enormous concentration and focus over months if not years. The hollow rock is a near perfect tool to both test and develop low ab capacity.
You can practise the innervation/recruitment required to engage the lower abs/flex the lumbar spine and perform the hollow rock by standing with your back, feet, and head against the wall and pressing hard against the wall at the shoulders and slowly rolling the contact point from the shoulders down to the mid-back, down to the lumbar spine and ending with the butt pushed hard against the wall. You will notice that making hard contact with the wall through the region of the low back is exceedingly hard and requires an anterior to posterior roll of the pelvis and deep low ab contraction. You can test the contact by having someone place a rolled up magazine in the region of the lumbar curve while you try to pinch it against the wall as they attempt to slide it out. Done correctly, this produces a distinctive pulling above the pubic bone. That’s your lower abs working. Repeating this ten times is a great low ab conditioning drill.
Practice the hollow rock even if it gives you difficulties. Start by trying to rock continuously for two minutes regardless of the quality of the movement. Avoid raising the hands and feet to maintain the rocking motion as best you can.
When mastered, the body is dished out flat, the hands and feet are low, and the impetus for the rocking is nearly undetectable. When you can do this smoothly – no flat spot – for two minutes you’ll have the best abs in town.
when asked who the fittest person is but we think that extreme strength is also an aspect of fitness so a person who can squat 250kg is pretty fit in our book.
