Chris Jarmon, CSCS

The Tank push sled is an excellent and versatile piece of equipment. It runs on wheels that resist your push with the torque of its built-in gears, whereas most other sleds are build on rails that resist your push via friction against the ground.

Once you overcome a normal sled's inertia and get it sliding, the difficulty of the push becomes slightly easier. The tank's torque ensures that its inertia remains more constant throughout the push.

In my opinion the tank's versatility comes primarily from its adaptability. The sturdy off-road style tires allow you to push it on just about any indoor/outdoor surface—whereas prowler sleds are primarily designed to be used on turf, grass, or specialty gym flooring. You can also change the resistance by adding/removing weight plates and/or switching the gears, whereas most sleds only allow you to add or remove plates.

To be clear, traditional-style sleds are still an indispensable tool that I like to use; they just have different attributes and a different feel, so I use them for slightly different purposes. For example, when you set the tank at a particular gear, you limit its speed and trying to push it faster will just make it flip over. Prowler-type sleds, however, can be pushed at a faster speed—limited only by friction, weight distribution, and the angle you push it at.

Shoot me a FB message if you want to come to Landow Performance and find out if you can handle The Tank!

Ab rollouts can be performed with a variety of implements (ab wheel, barbell, and landmine are just a few examples). Like most exercises using a suspension trainer, this one is easy to modify by either lengthening/shortening the TRX straps or stepping forward/backward to change your starting position. It's all about finding a challenging but manageable level of mechanical disadvantage.

Rolling out to this position changes our body's leverage, so then gravity starts fighting harder to extend our spine and flex our shoulders back. To fight back against gravity and stay in position, we need to create muscle tension throughout the trunk and shoulder complex.

Whether it's performed as an elbow tap or a shoulder tap, the point of this exercise is the same: removing a point of support and challenging the body to briefly stabilize in a new, mechanically disadvantaged position.

Muscles in the trunk/core region need to stabilize the spine against multiple joint forces during the exercise, resisting compression (pushing) on one side, distraction (pulling) on the other side, and torque (twisting). The strength and stability built from resisting these forces is useful for making your body more resilient both in sport and daily life.

The glutes, especially the glute medius and minimus, play a critical role in stabilizing the hip laterally. This exercise targets those hip abductors (a group that also includes the TFL and IT Band) to improve hip stability, among other qualities.

When hip abductors are weak, they can't control the hip from shifting out—thereby placing additional stress on the quadratus lumborum (muscles in your low back, on either side of your spine). So if you have pain/tightness in your QL area, one answer might be strengthening the hip abductor muscles.

This can be a nice exercise to sprinkle into workout programs, because the side-to-side (frontal) plane of movement is often neglected by coaches and trainees in favor of more straight-on (sagittal) exercises.

Each exercise in the Quadruped Series portion of the Landow Performance warmup is designed to isolate a specific hip joint movement—in this case, hip extension.

Only the hip joint should be moving, without any movement compensation coming from other areas. This might mean that you get less range in the movement, but that's ok—we're only worried about what's happening at the hip here, and moving past a certain point will invariably get the lower back involved. So the emphasis needs to be on stopping each rep once the hip reaches end range of extension, rather than sacrificing spinal position/integrity to kick the foot higher.

As a coach, I'm looking at this not only as a warmup/glute exercise, but also an evaluation. I'm looking to see range of motion exclusively within your hips, keeping an eye out for differences in range between your right and left hip that could be an area for further investigation; if your lower back gets involved to aid the movement, then the exercise loses its potential utility as a diagnostic tool.

Active Isolated Stretching (AIS) is a method for stretching along the lines of stress in a muscle while relaxing the muscle. To relax, we contract the opposing (antagonist) muscle, move into a stretch for about 2 seconds, then release the stretch. The stretch is performed for repetitions (typically around 8 reps based on what I've seen in the literature).

AIS is hypothesized to reduce friction between fascial sheets, creating movement with each rep that starts to break down muscle adhesions and scar tissue.

Research has indicated that AIS likely creates a better increase in range of motion than static stretching, while generating less torque on the muscles. This is important for me since in the video I'm stretching a previously injured area that still exhibits some pain/tenderness.

One of the most crucial things I seek to establish with each of my clients and athletes is scapular control, or the ability to feel and move their shoulder blades (scapulae) into different positions.

The scapulae can move up (elevation), down (depression), forward and apart (protraction), back and together (retraction), and can rotate upward or downward. In order to perform exercises correctly, athletes/clients need to know what these different scapular movements and positions feel like.

The Bent Over Post (short for posterior) T exercise is great for practicing scapular protraction/retraction, and building strength around the scapulae so that you'll be stronger at holding a neutral scapular position during an exercise like the deadlift.

Lately I have been working to strengthen my feet, because foot function can have such a massive impact on what happens higher up the kinetic chain (knees, hips, etc.)

Historically, when I've balanced on one foot I was mostly just focused on not falling over. Meanwhile my foot would wobble back and forth - rolling up onto the outside of my foot, then collapsing down flat. I was essentially just trying to balance on a peg leg instead of really using my foot to stay grounded and balanced.

There are 3 directional arches in the foot, which we refer to collectively as the "arch". My weakest / least functional of the 3 is the transverse arch, which runs sideways across the forefoot from the ball of the big toe (1st metatarsal) to the ball of the pinky toe (5th metatarsal).

For this exercise, I'm making a conscious effort engaging all 3 arches to create and maintain the foot's overall arch while balancing. The complexity of the exercise can be leveled up by adding perturbations—with a medicine ball or a resistance band, for example.

Many of us don't have great strength in drawing our shoulder blades down and back, especially if we spend lots of time each day hunched over with shoulders rounded forward. This strength deficit often reveals itself in the pull up exercise; the body compensates by rounding the shoulders forward and using more anterior (front side) muscles like the pvecs.

In most rowing and lat pulldown movements, I like to see the shoulderblades (aka the scapulae, or "scaps" for short) initiate the pulling sequence by drawing down and back (depression and retraction, respectively). This helps to keep the intended muscles working throughout the pull up while reducing the likelihood of cheating on the exercise.

However, over the course of a set of pull ups, the muscles involved in scapular depression and retraction will usually begin to fatigue; if this fatigue comes on extremely quickly then it's a sign to strengthen.

For this, I like an exercise that I picked up from my time with - the Hanging Scap Up focuses strictly on scapular retraction and depression without finishing the pull up. In addition to making you better at pull ups, it's a great exercise for your overall posture. Don't start out too aggressive with the rep/set volume for this one!