Restore: The hips program

The CRab bridge

You may have seen this movement in RESTORE: The Core Program. It’s not only an excellent exercise to train hip stability, it also trains stillness and control in the trunk. In other words, it is also a great core stability exercise.

As you practice this and the other movements in THIS program, you will see a recurring theme – a theme that revolves around the basic skill of creating basic hip stability as the foundation for improving hip strength.

If you’ve been battling an injury, chances are you’re also experiencing compensation in various parts of the body, and as a result, you’ll need to change to an even greater degree how you’re moving at that most basic level.

So now is a good time to simply say, embrace learning. Embrace this process. And as you move into more movements and exercises and begin to progress your skills, remember to stay true to the basic and fundamental skills you’re now deep into learning. Everything you’ll do moving forward will be built upon these foundational skills. Your ability to translate these basics directly into how you’re moving in your chosen sports will depend on your level of mastery of these basics, combined with progressing them steadily and consistently throughout your training.

The most important recurring theme is?

Remember, the definition of stability is to stop or control motion in one location, in the presence of motion somewhere else. For us right now, the stillness should be around the middle – our pelvic girdle and especially, our low-back or lumbar spine.

The Crab Bridge continues with this theme.

In this exercise, our objective is to challenge hip AND core stability by moving from a balanced, symmetric support system for our body (2 arms and 2 legs) to an asymmetric support system.

Think of it a bit like a wheelbarrow:

We’re focusing on setting up on 4-points (simply referred to as a 4-point stance) while establishing and maintaining a neutral and still pelvic girdle…so that we can then carefully unload one foot at a time, to a 3-point stance.

In other words, a sort of wheelbarrow. 😊

In the beginning (or what is referred to in the video as Level 1), our only goal is lifting a leg, while everything else remains still.

In Level 2, we will move to a more challenging arm lift, as you’ll see. Master your leg lift before moving on.

How frequently should you practice this?

Practice these movements as often as you can. As soon as you see your concentration waning, however, take a break and come back to it a bit later on. It’s much better to “chunk it,” breaking your practice time into 4 to 8 short segments of 2-5 minutes, then it would be to do one single practice session of 15 to 20 minutes.

Quality over quantity. Learning. Change. Quality repetition.

And keep it fun!