Strong, Healthy Shoulders Part 2: A-Frame Progressions
If you happened to miss Part 1 of how we build shoulder strength, you can find our blog post here:
You’ll learn:
How to practice the A-Frame including form, cues and what to expect
Tips to increase your mobility and build foundational shoulder strength and stability at the same time
Some of the benefits for practicing the A-Frame
Strong, Healthy Shoulders (CONTINUED)
Once you have built up some foundational strength, you can progress steadily to more challenging shoulder strength exercises and continue building usable strength and stability for injury prevention, rehab and every day shoulder health.
The Bear Crawl
The Bear Crawl is a type of ground-based locomotive movement.
You might find it used in gymnastics and martial arts practices to build strength and conditioning.
We teach a few different “animal” movements, such as the Frog, Monkey, Duck and Lizard Crawl.
The Bear Crawl is a nourishing, full body workout – it’s the perfect way to achieve more strength, stability and flexibility, particularly in the shoulders, arms and back but also flexibility and stability from the calves through to the upper back!
How to do the Bear Crawl:
Step 1: Begin in an A-Frame (click here to see how to get into an A-Frame)
Step 2: From this position, keep arms and legs straight and continue to push up through the shoulders.
Step 3: To begin the crawling motion, you’ll need to move the opposite hand and foot forward. Lift and move your right hand and left foot forward together to take one step, then move your left hand and right foot forward together to take the next step.
Step 4: Continue this pattern, and you’ll be performing the Bear Crawl! You can also perform this walk backwards.
There’s lots of variations, but here’s 4 of our favourites:
Normal Bear – straight arms and straight legs
Reverse Bear – same as above, but backwards
Bent Arm Bear – bent arm, straight legs
Bent Leg Bear – straight arm, bent legs
These variations target different muscle groups more thoroughly, so it can be a great way to individualise your training and strengthen some body parts that need more attention.
If you want to build more shoulder strength for example, working on the Bent Arm Bear would be a good choice. If you wanted to work on core stabilisation and balance, you could use the Bent Leg Bear variation.
Pike Push Up
Once you’ve mastered the previous movements, you can begin to practice pressing your bodyweight up and down, just like the classic bodyweight exercise, the Push Up.
The difference here is that we will be partially upside-down, compared to the Push Up, so we will be targeting more of the shoulders and upper back.
This is also a natural progression towards building strength for the Handstand, and being able to do a Handstand Push Up.
A Pike Push Up is a skill that you’ll need to work up to. If you’ve already mastered the A-Frame and the Bear Crawl you’ve made a great start laying the foundations to begin working towards this movement.
Try these progressions to begin working on your pressing strength:
Partial range of motion: Start by placing a yoga block on the floor that is slightly in front of your hands. Start to lower down into the Pike Push Up, while making sure that your elbows are tucked into the sides of your body. As you progress in your strength, you can reduce the yoga block height. Once you are able to do 3-5 reps at the lowest yoga block height, you can move to the next progression.
Slow eccentrics: Start in the A-frame and slowly lower into the Pike Push Up until your head touches the floor. The aim here is to do this as slow as possible, with a 5-10 second count. Once you are able to do 3-5 reps with a consistent 10 second count, try the next progression.
Pike Pushup: To perform the full movement, you simply lower with control into the Pike Pushup position, and then push yourself out so that you return back to the A-Frame. Aim to work up to 3 sets of 10 reps!
Try some of these exercises for a few weeks and see how great your shoulders feel!
