How To Improve Your Upper Body Stability | The Climbing Doctor

A nice exercise that you can do after you've done the upper extremity wide balance test is using sliders on the ground. Now these are just furniture sliders. If you don't have furniture sliders you can use socks on hardwood, maybe even towels on hardwood, or paper plates on a soft surface such as a bouldering pad or carpet. So you're going to put them underneath your knees and underneath your arms as well. Your knees will be stacked underneath your hips. Your hands will be stacked underneath your shoulders. You'll have a mild bend in your spine, so a mild arch, a little bit of an arch there. And then just reach your arms out overhead as if you were to grab climbing holds overhead. And then keep your core engaged and then pull back into the starting position. There's a common tendency when you engage your core and when we pull back to start to almost round our spine forward. So try and keep your posture nice and upright and go back down again. Hold that position. Excellent. And then push your arms in the ground. Very good. One more time. And then press in. Now try doing that without bending the elbow. And this is the big challenge. So come all the way out. Keep the elbow straight and then come back. And there's a push. So to advance this now, you can come up into a push-up position. So bring your arms all the way out. Bring your elbows in line with your shoulder a little bit. And then reach out your right arm and do mini circles clockwise and counterclockwise, where you're putting a lot of work and stability into this left side. Bring that right arm back. Left arm reaches. Mini circles, putting all this stability now into your right side. And then come back to the starting position. All right, so now we're gonna step it up a little bit. And instead of using sliders on the ground, let's use rings. And these are the same rings you train with. Yeah, this is the rings I use a few times a week. All right, so let's see what you do. So the first one, let's go for exercise number one. All right. So you can see John's on his knees. He's gonna roll all the way out. He's gonna get full extension and then come back. As he's coming back, he's making sure to keep his chest tall. So try not to hunch forward. So pull back. Keep a tall chest. Excellent. And John, what are some tips that you have with the technique for this exercise? The most important part for this when I'm teaching someone else is to not let your lower back sag forward to engage your core throughout the whole exercise, front and back. Nice. So that's basically the most important thing. And so it sounds like when they're right at the end position, that's where they may start arching the back. Yeah, that's where the position is most stressful. So the weakness kind of appears then. Okay, so now let's do exercise number two. So with this exercise, he's on his knees as well to decrease the demand. He's gonna go up into a push-up position and he's gonna reach one arm all the way overhead and then bring it back. Drop down and go on the opposite side. One arm drops, the other overhead. Now, John, with this exercise, what are some tips that you give? The tips that are most important for me is that I try to make it one fluid motion. So it's not a two-part exercise, as in you're not pushing down and then reaching out. It should kind of be on a sliding track, moving forward and down at the same time. Very nice. And then the third exercise, this one's a little bit harder. It's slightly harder because it's a similar exercise but it works slightly different muscles. So what I've seen over time teaching other people this or doing it myself is that it's just harder. These muscles are harder to engage. They're not as strong generally. All right, let's look at exercise number three. So same thing on your knees. You go up into the push-up position and then you reach all the way out to the side and then come back, alternating arms, getting that full extension, keeping the core engaged. Excellent. Any other tips with this one? Kind of the same as the second exercise. It's one fluid motion and not two separate motions. And just to make sure that you don't sag too low, that being past the rings and really dipping your shoulder down. And the same with the back on this one as well because it'll put you in a more compromised position. Nice. And I think climbers too, they can adjust the height of the rings. If they want to make it a little bit easier, they can bring it up a little bit higher as well. So how do you make it harder? So for rock stars like yourself, if you want to give yourself more challenge. I would say the easiest way to make it harder is to either scoop back and if that becomes too much or too easy, then you go on your feet. So typically, I find a position and the ideal position for me is I can measure it by going out and if I'm in a basic plank position. So my arms are parallel to each other. They're not moving forward or back based on where the rings are positioned on the wall. Got it. So you're in a nice plank. Your wrists are right underneath your shoulders. Yeah, exactly. Cool. So then I'll start standing, no pressure on the rings and all the weight's on my feet and I'll just glide forward and glide back. And the main difference with this one is that you're really focusing on returning the return and that's all in your core and your shoulders. You're almost like pulling yourself back with the strength of your core. Yeah, you can see that. Tough to do. It is quite hard. Yeah, for sure. All right, exercise number two. So exercise number two, same position. Legs could go slightly wider. That's just to help mitigate balance and stuff. You go out to the position, resting position if you call it, and then same exercise. And number three. And number three. This is a tough one. This is one of the ones for sure. So same idea. Start here and out to the side. And I see how fluid you're talking about. You're able to really make that a fluid motion, almost like on the rock wall, as if you were to transition from one to the other. Yeah, from one arm to the next if you're doing a wide move or something like that, a transition. Another really key thing with the rings is to not jolt back in any position. Jolt forward and almost fall into it. You really want to control that. And if you get to the point where your muscles are getting fatigued and you're going too fast, that's just a stopping point. So I tell people, it could be six to eight. It could be eight to ten. It just kind of depends on your ability level. But the moment, say you get to five and you are fatigued and you're kind of letting it drop a bit, that's a good stopping point. Yeah, and it sounds like the movement, the quality of the motion, is so important. And that's even more important than how many reps you can do. Definitely. Quality over quantity, without a doubt, need this. For sure.