MorlandSTRENGTH seeks to educate and help others reach their personal goals. This blog is dedicated to the past and current assistant coaches I’ve had the opportunity to influence and mentor over the years. I hope I can motivate and inspire you to be better coaches and influence more students and athletes to move better and ultimately we can all make a difference in the strength and conditioning profession which is calling for coaches who really care about doing progressions the right way.
This may seem simple for some people and it could be a bit of a reach for others so please stay with me about how I’ve experienced a new core revolution in strength that produced a 100% increase. The beginning of the school year provided some great challenges of limited time and an opportunity to see champion moments. I made a promise to do something to increase my fitness everyday and it worked. This past Monday morning I experienced one of the greatest champion moments in physical fitness by forward crawling the full length of a football field in just over 4 minutes. After coaching the breakfast club I invested 10-15 minutes on the turf football field for some fresh air and forward crawling. Over the last few years I’ve been curious about how much progress I would make with dedicated crawling time. This interest has peaked over the last three months coaching 50 high school freshman where I saw great gains in core stability and strength through crawling.
After coaching 50 high school freshman over 6 weeks I saw great gains in core stability and strength.
After 15 sessions of crawling 4 times a week, I could see progress in these 14 year old students that would take 6 months with other groups I coach! I could begin seeing gains in their movement patterns including squats, deadlifts, lunges, and push-ups. With these results in mind I set out to discover the benefits of crawling for myself. I did a planned progression over the course of 4 weeks with a pre-test assessment, progressive overload, and relevant energy system training.
The two goals I had in doing my own program was to explore forward crawling as a relevant mode for developing a strong CORE and to show that planned progression is worth the wait.
In the introduction I talk about the activity itself and my preparation over the last few weeks. Following is the program I did over the 4 weeks:
Video Introduction to 120 yard crawl:
| Week #1 | Week # 2 | Week #3 | Week #4 | |||||||
| Day #1 (September 18th) | Assessment = 60 yards (3 minutes) | Day #6 | 4 X 40 yards | Day #11 | 3 X 50 yards + 1 X 30 yards | Day #16 | 6 X 25 yards tempo 45 sec.:45 sec W:R | |||
| Day #2 | 3 X 30 yards | Day #7 | 4 X 40 yards | Day #12 | 4 X 50 yards | Day #17 | 8 X 25 yards tempo. | |||
| Day #3 | 4 X 30 yards | Day #8 | 4 X 40 yards | Day #13 | 4 X 50 yards | Day #18 | OFF | |||
| Day #4 | 4 X 30 yards | Day #9 | 4 X 40 yards | Day #14 | 4 X 50 yards | Day #19 | 6 X 25 yards tempo 45 sec.:45 sec W:R | |||
| Day #5 | 4 X 40 yards | Day #10 | 4 X 50 yards | Day #15 | 3 X 50 yards + 1 X 50 yards | Day #20 | 8 X 25 yards tempo. | |||
| Day #21 Retest = 120 yards (October 16th) | ||||||||||
| Total = 550 yards | Total 840 yards | Total = 1010 yards | Total = 650 yards | |||||||
Video debrief of the 120 yard forward crawl:
Video of full 120 yards in 4 minutes and 4 seconds:
After a two day recovery I attempted the retest of my core endurance on Monday morning of October 16th. Each day prior to the test I crawled between 8-12 minutes. This was a very minimal time commitment (about 4 hours of training) for the results I experienced. One simple way I have explained the results to others is that I saw a 100% increase in core endurance and strength over 4 weeks with just 4 hours of work! I learned this method from Coach Tim Anderson of Original STRENGTH as he shared with me in the benefits of contra-lateral movement (opposite arm…opposite leg pattern). According to him this is the way our bodies were designed to move, which I support too. One added benefit I found was the neuro-pathical sharpness of focus and concentration I experienced that lasted for hours after the workouts. The human body has been wonderfully designed to adapt to each stimulus. I’m looking forward to learning more about the neuro-sharpening mechanism at work in these primitive movement patters as I apply them to youth skill development. I admit these results seem almost too good to be true, but this is just what happened with this 43 year old! If I can see this level of results how much more benefits can our youth see who have much larger adaptation windows and even greater uptake to skill development?
Have you integrated crawling like this before or do you have questions about my conclusions? If so, please type me a message below and we’ll get back to you. We are here to educate and help others.
There is one final blog in this planning series coming up and I’m going to announce our blogging teams’ exciting new series for the Fall. Stay tuned as this is destined to be a great series!
Chris Morland, MS, CSCS
MorlandSTRENGTH CEO
Educator and Coach | Visionary in High School Strength and Conditioning
Director of Strength and Conditioning at Cardinal Gibbons High School | Teacher
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