reckonerSide plank
On one elbow, hips stacked and lifted, body in one line from the ear to the ankle. It is the plainest way to load the side of your trunk, and one of the few bodyweight holds that has been measured producing enough activity to count as strengthening work1.
Stack the hips, lift them off the floor.
- Pattern
- Core anti-extension
- Trains
- Obliques, abs
- Kit
- Bodyweight, floor
- Loading
- Your own bodyweight
- Reckoner prescribes
- 3 holds of 30 to 60 seconds
- Progression step
- 10 seconds on the hold
- Skill
- Some technique
- Recovery cost
- Very low
- Not prescribed if you have declared
- Shoulder
Muscles worked
How to do it
Set the elbow under the shoulder
Lie on your side, elbow directly beneath the shoulder, forearm flat and pointing forward. Legs stacked or, if that is too much, the bottom knee down and bent behind you.
Lift the hips into one line
Push the floor away and raise the hips until your ear, shoulder, hip, knee and ankle make a straight line. Not a sag, not a pike.
Stack the hips and keep them there
Both hip bones should point straight ahead rather than one rolling toward the floor. Squeeze the glutes and reach the top arm to the ceiling or rest it along your side.
Hold until the line breaks
The set ends when the hips start to drop or roll, and the time before that is the number to log. Then do the other side, because the two are rarely equal.
What goes wrong
The top hip rolling forward
Turning slightly toward the floor makes the hold much easier and it is nearly impossible to feel. If you can see your bottom hand's knuckles rolling under you, the hips have gone.
Elbow out in front of the shoulder
A forearm placed too far forward takes the shoulder out of a strong position and the hold fails there first. It should be straight under the joint.
Chasing minutes
A long hold in a mediocre position proves less than a short one in a good one. When it stops being hard, go to a harder version rather than a longer timer.
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 | 3 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 | 3 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 | 3 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 | 3 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 | 3 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 three 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
How long should I be able to hold a side plank?
Judge it against your other holds rather than against a fixed number. In seventy-five healthy young adults, men sustained the side plank for about two thirds of their back extension hold and almost as long as their trunk flexion hold, while women managed about two fifths and four fifths of the same two2. A side that is far weaker than the rest of your trunk, or far weaker than the other side, is the finding worth acting on.
Is this actually a strength exercise?
For two muscles, yes. Of nine bodyweight exercises measured, the side plank was one of only three to pass the level usually taken as a strengthening stimulus, and it did so at the gluteus medius and the external oblique1. Most bodyweight trunk work does not.
How do I make it harder?
Stack the feet rather than staggering them, lift the top leg, or move to the version with your top shin on a bench, which is the Copenhagen plank and is in this library too. Reckoner treats the side plank as an alternative to the plank and the hollow hold, so your history stays in one line when it swaps.
Similar movements
There is no load to ease on this lift, so Reckoner offers one of these the first time it stalls. Each of them has a page.
Sources
- Ekstrom, Donatelli and Carp, Journal of Orthopaedic and Sports Physical Therapy, 2007. Electromyographic analysis of core trunk, hip, and thigh muscles during 9 rehabilitation exercises thirty healthy adults across nine bodyweight exercises, where the side bridge was one of only three to pass 45 per cent of a maximal contraction, at the gluteus medius and the external oblique, and the quadruped arm and leg lift did so at the gluteus maximus, with every other exercise below that line and therefore better suited to endurance than to strength
- McGill, Childs and Liebenson, Archives of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, 1999. Endurance times for low back stabilization exercises: clinical targets for testing and training from a normal database seventy-five healthy young adults timed on four isometric torso holds, where men sustained the side bridge for 65 per cent of their back extension time and 99 per cent of their trunk flexion time while women managed 39 and 79 per cent, with repeat reliability above 0.97