CST Bodyweight Glide Part One

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(This article is part one of a seven part series. Be sure to grab each of the installments to assemble your complete 6-Degree CST Bodyweight Glide program...)

While a six-pack stomach may be the most conventional benchmark of athletic beauty, functional abdominal strength goes deeper and is far more important than vanity. A strong core improves your posture and reduces the likelihood of lower back pain. It plays a stabilizing role in virtually every movement you do—from carrying the groceries or bending down to tie your shoes to throwing a ball or pulling a heavy lift. It is also the source of power generation in most athletic activities.

We’re going to build a killer core with bodyweight exercise, in as little as 12-minutes per session.

How?

By training in 6 degrees of freedom.

Training in 6-Degrees of Freedom

What the heck does that mean?

It’s a term we took from aviation, because it most accurately describes how your body moves through space.

We don’t move robotically through one plane at a time. Human movement is a complex weave through different planes and on different axes. If we take the three axes of conventional movement descriptions, we can think about moving both along and around those axes in or-der to take advantage of our true movement potential: 6-degrees of freedom:

• Heaving: moving up and down

• Swaying: moving right and left

• Surging: moving forward and backward

• Pitching: bending forward and backward

• Yawing: twisting right and left

• Rolling: turning right and left

The bottom line?

Training in 6-Degrees of Freedom will kick your ass faster than any other method.

Why does that matter? It means you’ll be finished training sooner. Training in 6-Degrees will also ensure that your body remains balanced. You won’t waste time dealing with overuse injuries, or overcompensations created by doing the same repetitive movements in the same planes day after day.

That’s a brief primer on the theory. Let’s get to the program.

CST Bodyweight Glide Part One

This program is designed to shred your core in as little as 12-minutes per day using only bodyweight exercise.

The movements were designed to be done with those little plastic glide discs you’ve seen on TV. But the good news is you don’t need the discs. Socks, RMAX ultimate grappling shoes, and squares of felt all work on hardwood floors. Disposable paper plates work great on carpet. If you’re on a business trip and staying in hotels, tear a page out of one of the free glossy magazines in the desk drawer, or put the plastic laundry bag from the closet on your feet. Anything that will allow your feet to slide on the floor will work.

Movement one is the Heaving component: the knee in.

Remember, keep your shoulders packed, rotate your elbow pits forward, maintain good crown to coccyx spinal alignment, and activate your core with a hard exhale on every rep. These movements should be core driven.

Now go try it out for yourself!

If your response in the comments is good, we’ll reveal the next exercise. If you REALLY like where we’re going and speak out, we’ll reveal all six, and in the final installment I’ll tell you how to put it together into a training program.

Good luck!

(Click to read part two => bodyweight core workout)

You may also enjoy:

1. Bodyweight Exercise – Fitness by degrees
2. Bodyweight Workout — Get Stronger For Longer