Best Exercise in Ever: Rolling Thunder

I have two dogs I like to rough house with every once in a while, and occasionally this involves getting down to their level. They’re a couple of boston terriers (one pure bred, the other mixed with a french bull dog) and to say they have energy is like saying Anne Hathaway needed to wear some nip guards at the Oscars. Ryan Seacrest pretty much got laser eye surgery from those things.

As a result of playing with my dogs, I tend to crawl around, roll, spin, and all sorts of things not considered “exercise” by classic restricted means, but I work up a sweat and get some crazy core work going on.

I’m not alone in this thought. Check out a lot of mixed martial arts training, combat training, football training, capoeira and gymnastics and you’ll see a lot of the same thing, but maybe called something different or used in a different manner.

One person whom I’ve grown to really appreciate and get inspired by is Ido Portal, a movement trainer who focuses on people attaining movement competency and quality instead of simply trying to see who can lift the most weight. It’s no surprise that his focus on movement first has made him incredibly lithe and also incredibly strong from all angles. Check it out:

[youtuber youtube=’http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_eTg6gMTE0′]

The really cool thing after seeing stuff like this is not only his sense of control and stability through the movements, but the inter-segmentation of every joint, muscle, and neuron in the body to produce the movements, balances, and interconnections of each movement into a flowing work like water cascading down a hill.

As a result of some of this I’ve begun to incorporate some of the rolling and crawling patterns into my clients training and also into my own. For one, it spices things up and makes for a much less boring workout. Too, it challenges them to not only consider what is working but how it is all working together to produce a synergistic movement that relies on everything at once and nothing by itself.

That’s where Rolling Thunder comes in. I stole this from Charlie Weingroff, and it sparked some memories of being back in play school and later in karate where we had to do different types of tumbling, and as an adult it just seems like as much fun as it did back then.

[youtuber youtube=’http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBN-bvKWBs4′]

This combines a crawl pattern with a roll, both forward and back. It’s something that’s incredibly challenging to learn for some and incredibly easy to pick up for others, so playing around with it is the best advice I could give for technique. The big keys are to make sure you roll in a fairly tight ball and know where the ground is at all times so you can maneuver to your hands and feet when required. Go over the side of the head and shoulder instead of trying to go straight over the head if you’re a little hesitant so you can get through the movement with less possible neck strain if you’re scared of that possibility.

I wouldn’t recommend this as an exercise for someone with current back pain or neck pain, but I would eventually want to get them to use a combination movement where the upper body and lower body have to communicate together to get the job done via relaying impulses through the core, as evident in this piece of awesome. Plus, the name is so cool you should do it just to say you were throwing down some Rolling Thunders in the gym today.

You could also do this movement by crawling sideways and rolling over your shoulders in a lateral barrel roll if that suited your fancy more, but either way rolling is something I’m adding into my training and also some of my clients who can handle it. It should be fun to see what kind of results we can get out of it.