To Perform the Advanced Plank Exercise:
- Begin by lying on your stomach with your forearms and elbows resting on the floor directly underneath your shoulders with your ankles positioned so that the balls of your feet are in contact with the ground (Figure 1).
- Lift your hips off the ground so your upper and lower body form a straight line, just as you did in the Intermediate Plank exercise (Figure 2).
- Lift one leg into the air. As you do this you should feel both the anterior hip and thigh muscles on your support leg and your abdominal muscles contract harder, and you should feel a contraction in your posterior hip (i.e., in your glute muscle) of the leg that was lifted (Figure 3).
- It is important to hold the back perfectly straight. Do not allow your lower back to dip or twist towards the floor (Figure 4), and not to allow the hips to rise too high into the air. Many athletes find it helpful to pull their pelvis up towards their sternum by performing a posterior pelvic tilt during this exercise.
- Begin by holding one leg in the air for 5-10 seconds. Bring the leg back to the ground so that both feet are in contact with the ground for 5-10 seconds, then lift the opposite leg for 5-10 seconds.
- Repeat this process three times so each leg is held in the air for 30 seconds. When this becomes too easy, you can make the exercise more challenging by increasing the time each leg is held in the air and reducing the number of repetitions to maintain a total contraction time of 30 seconds per side.
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