How To Do Bear Crawl
Bear Crawl Exercise
Bear Crawl is a great exercise that develops several muscles in the body including the entire core section, the shoulders, chest, legs, lower back and glutes.
Bear Crawl is a functional exercise that builds overall body strength and improves coordination, flexibility, mobility and stability.
Doing Bear Crawls going forward will work the legs while going backward will place more emphasis on the upper body.
This is a valuable exercise to use for rehab purposes if you are coming off shoulder injury and want to maintain shoulder strength.
It utilises different neural pathways so you can work around the injured area.
Bear Crawl How To
- Start out with your hands and knees on the floor. Elevate your hips so that your knees are off the floor. Maintain a straight back position; your upper back must be in line with your hips and shoulders.
- Crawl by moving your right arm forward simultaneously with your left leg. Then alternate with your left arm followed by your right leg. The knee must not extend past your hips. Maintain the low back position throughout the exercise.
- To increase the degree of difficulty, crawl going backward. This time, lead with your right leg going back followed by your left arm.
- Alternate with your left leg moving back followed by your right arm.
- Repeat until you have completed the targeted number of crawls or the time period for the exercise.
Form and Technique
Start out slow when doing Bear Crawl for the first time because this exercise requires coordination.
Get the correct form and technique before picking up speed.
Remember to maintain the flat back position and to not drop your hips too low.
Going backward is more difficult. Again start out slow and pick up speed once you have perfected your form and technique.
An effective program for Bear Crawl is to do several sets of 40 second crawls; 20 seconds forward and 20 seconds backward.
Keep your rest period to 2 minutes between sets.
Routine for Strength: 3 sets x 60 seconds