conditioning
Bear Crawl
Works in
home, gym, calisthenics
Equipment
none
Primary muscles
full body, core
Why do it
A full-body conditioning tool for every level. It hammers the core, shoulders, chest, triceps and legs at once while spiking your heart rate, so it burns serious calories and is great if fat loss is the goal. This is the kind of work that carries straight over to Hyrox-style events and general readiness. Thirty to forty-five seconds of steady crawling is plenty.
How to do it
Start on hands and feet with the knees hovering just off the floor. Crawl forward moving the opposite hand and foot together while keeping the hips low and back flat. Keep the knees close to the ground the whole time.
What the science says
Research on sprint interval training, repeated all-out efforts, shows it lifts your VO2 max, a core marker of fitness, by around 8 percent (Gist et al., 2014, Sports Medicine).