![]() ![]() Not only does that make the exercise a great cardio workout, it also demands even more stability from your core and shoulders. With sliders involved, "you can move at a faster pace to bring up the intensity," says McCall. When you add sliders to certain moves, like mountain climbers or plank jacks, you can challenge your body in a slightly different way than when you do them without the tool. Specifically, plank exercises with sliders are great for working the transverse abdominis, a deep internal core muscle that wraps around your spine and sides and is crucial for keeping your trunk stable in most exercises and everyday movements. It's also one of the most effective ways to engage a lot of muscles at once, he adds. When you move in this way, "you're keeping the muscle under tension but also lengthening the connective tissue around the muscle, which is one of the reasons why it makes you shake so much," says McCall. Adding sliders to various plank exercises allows you to do this by simply moving your foot or hand while keeping the other half of your body stationary. "If you want strong muscles around your spine and pelvis, you generally want to have your shoulders and hips moving in opposite directions," says McCall. The easiest (though I'd hardly call these moves easy) way to start using sliders in your workouts is by adding them to plank variations to work your core. Sliders are great for improving stability. Your muscles-particularly in your shoulders and core-have to really engage to fight back against that force and keep your body stable, which means you'll be working hard throughout the entire movement. "When you're pressing on a slider, you're essentially pushing force into the ground and since the ground doesn’t move under you, it presses tension back up onto you," McCall explains. When you use sliders, you have to really dig your foot or hand into them to control the movement and stop yourself from sliding all over the place. The reason slider exercises are so difficult is because they change the amount of friction that exists between your body and the ground, says Pete McCall, M.S., C.S.C.S., exercise physiologist and host of the All About Fitness podcast. And then I forget about these feelings of elation next class and my dread-pride cycle begins all over again. I feel like I just crushed something really challenging and did something good for my body. During the slider exercise, I can literally only think "When will this end?" But then afterward, I feel great. Whenever an instructor says it's time to use them, I am filled with dread. ![]() Sliders are one of those exercise tools that I have a true love/hate relationship with. ![]()
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