Monday Movement: Hanging and Getting Up

Hanging.  How many of you used to play on a playground when you were little?  You could swing yourself across the monkey bars easily?  Who has done that recently?  Let’s chat about grip strength.  Again, we lose it as we age.  If you have been following along for the last couple of months, are you seeing a theme of strength loss with age?  It’s true.  And, even more true, we have the control to change this.  It will just take a plan and some work. 

Standing up from the ground. As a physical therapist, I often practice this with my elderly patients. It is an important skill to have, often times under the umbrella of “fall recovery.”  If someone falls, how do they get themselves back up?  Over the last year or two, I have noticed that this is more difficult for me. I can do it, but it’s not this quick, easy, graceful flow of standing up.  This needed to change.  So, I added these two movement patterns into my last workout!

I set a timer for 30 minutes and did the following circuit, as many times through as time allowed: 

1. Hanging from a bar.  I did three repetitions, all until fatigue.  The first time doing this workout, I lasted 5 seconds each time I hung from the bar!  There was plenty of room for improvement here.  
2. Ring rows X20.  This is a great posture strengthening movement, as well as core!
3. Ab roller X10.  Yes, the ab roller from the 80’s (?) is what I used to activate my core.  
4. Lateral step-ups to a 12″ box X10/side.  This is an interesting one for me because I can do it with no problem on my left side, but my right side is much more of a struggle.  This is something that I notice too when I am doing lunges or standing from the ground: my left side forwards is much easier than my right side forwards.  There is room for improvement here too.  
5. Floor transfers, 2X/side.  There are so many variations to how you can do this.  I like Turkish Get-ups if you want to follow a specific, step-by-step plan. On this particular workout, I just did what felt natural with standing from the floor- rolling to the right twice and then the left twice.