Short Plank Workout That Will Make Your Core Beg For Mercy

When it comes to Isometric Exercise, the most popular that most people know is the Plank. Very simple; just get into a pushup position on your hands or forearms and hold it as long as you can without coming down to your knees. It's simple but not easy. Some people can barely last 30 seconds and others have held it for 5 minutes or more. It does however get boring after a while once you "mastered it."

There are all sorts of variations of the plank that doing just one for an extended period of time would be just limiting yourself. It does hold certain benefits such as building strength in your core, your tendons, shoulders, upper back and more but I feel the longer you can go with a certain variation, it's time to change things up.

Most hold a plank like on the hands or forearms like I mentioned earlier but what if you held it on your fists or fingertips? How about with your arms bent in the mid position or in the superman hold? One workout I did was hold a plank on my fists for over a minute but was also wearing my 20 lb weight vest. I'm around 260-265 lbs so I'm holding up about 65% of my bodyweight in the plank position, so calculate that (260 x .65 = 169 lbs.) and add 20 to that and you have nearly 190 lbs, that's a lot of weight to be holding in that position. That is a good amount of strength being developed.

Now let's kick it up a notch (without the weight vest this time) and do a plank workout where every few breaths or so, you change the hand positions in the plank without coming down. You can change one hand at a time or both hands it's up to you but think how your fired up your core would be if you changed the positioning on a dime. Fist one hand and flat palm the other, both fists, flat hands but the arms are bent, all of that in the plank position.

Some film it to test their durability and to show that Isometrics are an incredible method and telling people to toughen themselves up. It's brutal but its the kind of training many should strive for. I do it because it's fun and finding creative ways to train that could carry over to other areas. Imagine how strong your arms would be overall if you did various plank exercises in one shot and forget sit-ups and crunches, your core will be on fire just holding yourself up let alone changing the hand positions.

In the video below, I do a plank workout where I hold for over 2 minutes changing the positions of my hands in the process. 2 minutes sounds easy but I assure you, it definitely isn't. Try it and see how you do. You will test your strength that is non traditional and working muscles you didn't think would be working. Just trying to be flat is hard enough. If you think a minute on your forearms is easy, than I challenge YOU to do this.