Read Video Text Below:
Hi, David Weck here. I'm going to be teaching you an RMT Club exercise called the Double Club Side-to-Side Swing.
Here's what it looks like:
I'm going to be stepping back in a lunge, bringing the clubs to either side in a counter rotational movement. This exercise is awesome for helping your ability to counter rotate with better strength, integrity, balance, coordination and symmetry. It's really the seat of better running, throwing, hitting, and any kind of motion where you're going to have to be using that thoracic spine, rooting through the hips and the feet to rotate with power, strength, balance, etc.
Let's break this down: If you look at the weight and the hand action on this, it's the hands and the wrist that are critical because the rotation of the hands and the wrists is going to affect the balance through the shoulders and rotational ability through the thoracic spine. We're resolving the rotation all the way to the hands using the club as the resistance and the feedback to make sure we do that perfectly. The action through the hands is basically this: With my thumbs out front, the same side hand is supinating and rotates out, the opposite hand pronates and rotates in.
Now what I do is I step back into a lunge and use the momentum of the clubs to give me this big rotation with the knee in a nice neutral position. I'm very centered in the base, but I'm developing the ability to really rotate. The action of the supination and pronation is going to help me deepen and balance that motion so I can come out of it with more power. When I do that movement, it's very simple and you want to go nice and slow with these at first. You really pay attention to the wrists rotating and the knee position. You're going to feel that range of motion because the weight in the clubs are going to be pulling you into that rotation. The faster you do it, the more pull you'll get. The rotation sort of zeroes out the momentum so you get that extra range of motion that has no slack. That means that, when you throw or when you do anything with the hands, it's a better connection from the hands down to the hips, which routes to the floor.
We can increase progressions on this where we come to an overhead position and increase the speed in the clubs; really want to keep that knee centered on the rotation. I can add in another move where I've got the clubs overhead, I bring it back into the lunge, I swing it across my body both ways and then I repeat for both sides [for non-dominant side training]. I can really go to town on this exercise and have fun. To the extent that I'm not efficient and I may clip the body a tiny bit, the soft head of the RMT Club with the shifting load inside makes it very friendly, so you can go faster with a lot less risk of injury.
This exercise is one that you'll use in a workout as movement preparation or recovery from something else where you're developing skill. You don't want to use that as a metabolic exercise, the timing on it is not so metabolic and you'd have to incorporate some kind of a jump or something. It's really about getting the quality of the rotation the best that it can possibly be. Movement preparation and recovery from some other set are the best applications for this workout. You can get anywhere from eight to fifteen repetitions on each side. Practice makes perfect and that's what's going to unify the complete body with that counter rotational mobility. That's the RMT Club Double Side-to-Side swing.
