reckonerBear crawl
A bear crawl is a plank that travels. The whole job is keeping your hips from rocking side to side while one hand and the opposite foot are off the floor, and it is one of the movements Reckoner reaches for when there is floor space and nothing else.
Hips low, back flat, knees off the floor.
- Pattern
- Carry
- Trains
- Abs, front delts, quads
- Kit
- Bodyweight, floor
- Loading
- Your own bodyweight
- Reckoner prescribes
- 4 holds of 30 to 60 seconds, on the fat loss plan. Reckoner does not prescribe this pattern for muscle or strength.
- Progression step
- 10 seconds on the hold
- Skill
- Some technique
- Recovery cost
- Moderate
- Not prescribed if you have declared
- Wrist, shoulder, knee
Muscles worked
How to do it
Set up on hands and toes
Hands under the shoulders, knees under the hips and hovering just off the floor, toes tucked. Back flat, head in line with the spine. This position on its own is the exercise, before you go anywhere.
Move opposite hand and foot together
Right hand and left foot, then left hand and right foot. Short steps. Long ones make the hips swing, and the swing is the thing you are here to stop.
Keep the hips low and level
Imagine a glass of water sitting on the small of your back. If the hips rise, it becomes a walking downward dog. If they roll, the crawl has become a series of little twists you are not controlling.
Stop when the hips start to swing
That is the end of the set, whatever the clock says. Crawling on with the hips rocking trains the rocking. Note the time you held it cleanly and let the next week be longer.
What goes wrong
Hips riding high
It is much easier with the backside up, so that is where people drift. Up there the arms and the legs carry it and the trunk has nothing to resist.
Long, fast steps
Covering ground feels like progress and it is the wrong axis. Speed hides a rocking hip, and going further with a rocking hip is not going further.
Head up, looking forward
Watching where you are going pulls the neck into extension and the back follows it. Look at the floor a short way in front of your hands and let the neck stay long.
How Reckoner progresses this lift
Six weeks of this lift, run through the real engine. Nothing below was typed in: the prescription, the decision and the sentence beside it all come from the same code that writes your week.
| Week | Prescribed | What it did |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 4 x 30 s | Longer hold 30 → 40 sYou held every set at RPE 7, so the hold gains ten seconds. A hold with nothing in the hands climbs on time, because time is the only axis it has. |
| 2 | 4 x 40 s | Longer hold 40 → 50 sYou held every set at RPE 7, so the hold gains ten seconds. A hold with nothing in the hands climbs on time, because time is the only axis it has. |
| 3 | 4 x 50 s | Longer hold 50 → 60 sYou held every set at RPE 7, so the hold gains ten seconds. A hold with nothing in the hands climbs on time, because time is the only axis it has. |
| 4 | 4 x 60 s | Holding steady 60 sYou held every set at RPE 7, and 60 seconds is the top of what this hold was prescribed for. There is nothing to put in your hands to make it harder, so this one has run out of room. It stays where it is. If you want to keep pushing here, swap it for a harder movement when the block ends. |
| 5 | 4 x 60 s | Deload 40% of sets offFive weeks of building, then one week lighter. About 40% of the sets come off. The load holds and your reps stay where you earned them, so you keep the strength and lose the fatigue. |
| 6 | 2 x 60 s | Holding steady 60 sYou held every set at RPE 7, and 60 seconds is the top of what this hold was prescribed for. There is nothing to put in your hands to make it harder, so this one has run out of room. It stays where it is. If you want to keep pushing here, swap it for a harder movement when the block ends. The lighter week is over, so this is back to four sets. |
Real engine output, not an illustration. Every row was produced by running the engine itself when this page was generated.
The full rule, and why the reps move before the load does, is in how Reckoner decides to add weight.
Questions people ask
Does the bear crawl actually do anything?
Nobody has measured this one specifically, and that is worth saying plainly rather than dressing it up. What has been measured is trunk training as a category: pooled across thirty-one controlled trials in athletes it produced small to moderate improvements in strength, sprint speed and change of direction1. That is an argument for training the trunk, not for this particular way of doing it.
How long should a set be?
Long enough that the position starts to fail and short enough that you stop before it does. For most people that is well under a minute at first. Time held with the hips level is the number that counts, not distance covered.
Why does Reckoner give me seconds instead of reps?
Because a crawl is measured in time, so it progresses on the axis it is actually performed on. The engine adds seconds to it the same way it adds weight to a bar.
Similar movements
Reckoner has no other movement in this swap group.
Sources
- Saeterbakken and colleagues, Sports Medicine, 2022. The effects of trunk muscle training on physical fitness and sport-specific performance in young and adult athletes: a systematic review and meta-analysis thirty-one controlled trials and 693 athletes aged eleven to thirty-seven, with trunk muscle training producing significant small to large improvements in maximal strength, local muscular endurance, lower limb power, linear sprint speed and change of direction, and a moderate effect on sport-specific performance