Hi everyone, John here from Pain and Performance Strategies, and today I wanted to introduce uh one of my favorite exercises.
They’re called horse rotations and it’s a very simple movement, I’ll demonstrate the basic movement here. So I’ve got my legs fairly wide apart and I’m shifting my weight as well as turning my waist, but I’m not moving my knees a lot so my hips are staying pretty grounded and my feet are flat on the floor, but I’m turning the waist and I’m shifting the weight as well as I’m moving the arms.
The arm movements are almost infinite in variety – you can move the arms however you want, but I’ll be showing you the basic movement, and then we can start riffing from there. I love these exercises, these work your quads, they’ll work your glutes, and they’ll also work your arms. I love it because there’s no gear necessary, I don’t need any equipment, I can do this pretty much anywhere. I can stand up at my desk if I need a break, if I’m on a conference call, if I’m if I’m on a zoom meeting and my camera’s off and I’m muted I can do these as well.
I love to do these during commercial breaks when I’m watching TV, or if I’ve just been watching TV for a while and I’m binge watching something without commercials, I’ll get up and I’ll do some of these. If I’m cold as well it’s early January here in Charlottesville and it’s really chilly outside and sometimes I’ll do these just to warm up. Do I really like this exercise, and once you learn the basic movement there are lots of options and variations that you can do.
For example, if you use bands, you can use bands with this exercise very easily and you can start to load up and now I’m getting more of an upper body workout. I can also put the band over my shoulder and then step on it and now I’ve got some tension that is pulling me as I’m trying to turn this way and I’m having harder time controlling the movement as it’s pulling me back from this direction. so you want to be careful when you’re stepping out of a band coming up in the middle there. additionally we can use dumbbells, and this will provide some really good arm resistance and again you can do a number of different arm movements. I can pull back I can push forward I can uppercut so it really is an extremely flexible and and powerful exercise.
If you don’t have dumbbells just save your laundry detergent bottle the next time it runs out and then you can just fill it up with water and you’ve got a great great dumbbell. the nice thing about filling up something with water is that it’s going to put a little extra challenge there because the water is going to slosh and the weight is going to be your brain is going to have to pay a little more attention to controlling it.
So today I wanted to go over the first step in learning this exercise, and basically the first thing we want to do is learn how to turn the waist without moving the knees or the hips. and this is really challenging, so what I would suggest if you have some kind of bottle anything really but you know an empty plastic bottle – I’ve got Mr Oroville Redenbacher here, I’m a huge popcorn fan, and so just get a chair and sit on the edge of the chair and we’re gonna practice moving the waist without moving the hips.
Okay so what we’re going to do you can take your bottle, it can be a water bottle it could be a tennis ball really anything, but the idea is to have an external target on the front of whatever you’re holding and you’re going to pull the bottle in and touch your abdomen. Hold it to your stomach.
Now what I want to do I can push my arms my elbows out here so that they don’t hit the the chair arms as I’m turning, because what I’m going to do is turn to the corners, and the goal is to is to present the front of the bottle to the corners. so we’re just using this as a target because it’s very difficult to move this area independently of the legs and a lot of times we don’t have as much control over this area so we’re using this bottle to just give us a little bit more awareness.
now we don’t want to be moving the bottle with our hands, we’re not moving our arms at all, our arms are being moved but we’re not moving our shoulders, and we’re trying not to move our knees. that’s the real hard part – try not to move the knees.
So I’m moving the waist but I’m not really moving my knees, just little movements we’re not going too far. Okay if you’re having trouble with that and you find your knees are doing kind of a windshield wiper thing, go ahead and cross your feet and that will lock your legs down and then once again sit up straight on the edge of the chair and you can push your elbows out straight so that they don’t hit the if there’s a back of the chair that you’re sitting on.
And now once again try to turn without moving your legs and this is going to fire into those oblique abdominal muscles as there’s a lot of core musculature that’s involved in this and it will start to fine tune the core and educate the core as well as strengthen it.
So now if uh now that we’ve done that, let’s stand up and give that a shot without a chair. So we’re going to take a stance that’s a little wider than than shoulder width to start. Eventually you can go as low as you want — that’s one of things I love about this exercise — you can put as much load on your quads as you want. but for now just a little wider than shoulder width and then push the bottle to the front of your navel, and then pull your elbows in.
And now once again you’re going to bend your knees and try to keep your knees still as you present the front of that bottle to the corners. and you may find this really challenging and if you do you’re in good company — most of us don’t move our waist independently of our hips so you may find your whole body is moving as you move the torso.
That’s totally normal and totally fine, but as you keep going see if you can start to hold your knees in place as you present the front of the bottle to the left corner and then the right corner. So this is the first step in learning horse rotations, so we’re going to do 20 reps together to each corner — to the left corner and to the right corner.
So once again take a little wider than shoulder width stance, bend your knees a little bit and then pull the bottle to your stomach right in front of your navel. okay and once you’re ready try and keep your knees facing forward and then now you’re just gonna turn the front of this bottle to the corner.
Okay, so we’re going to your left and then to the right, to your left to your right, and we’re just going to do about 20. So that’s about 5, to the left, to the right, to the left, to the right, left and right okay. so we’re about halfway there and just see how much you can control this without slamming to one side or the other — you want to see how much you can control your torso moving without letting your knees and your legs move.
Ikay it’s about 14 and you don’t have to move very far, this is not a big movement because it is so controlled. you may already be starting to feel those quads starting to fire so let’s do two more to your left to your right to your left and to your right.
So that’s it that’s the first step in learning horse rotations. In the next video I will cover shifting the weight so we’ll break that down and extract it and we’ll just work on shifting the weight from one side to another but like I said I really enjoy this exercise.
once you get it down there are lots of variations that you can do and there are plenty of environments and that you can do it in, you can do it pretty much anywhere. So thanks a lot for watching and have a great day!
