It’s no secret I’m a huge fan of the Turkish Get Up.
It’s one of those lifts that may not build strength in the conventional fashion. You can get strong on the Get Up very quickly once you’ve nailed the technique.
But that is exactly where I see it’s value.
I have a category of exercises or exercise progressions that has become known as our “Glue” movements.
What do we mean by that?
Usually we categorise exercises in the following fashion:
Upper Body Push, Vertical or Horizontal Upper Body Pull, Vertical or Horizontal Hip Dominant or Hinge Knee Dominant or Squat
I didn’t invent these categories, I heard them from several other strength coaches.
Then there’s a fifth category that can be either core, gait or “everything else” depending on who you’re talking to.
But I like to think of this last category as Glue.
In other words, the stuff that links the four major categories together.
I’ve a load of drills that fit here.
One of the top drills is the Turkish Get Up.
It’s a lift that takes you from laying down to standing up while supporting a load overhead.
That requires the shoulder to move through a large range of motion under a relatively static load. It means the core musculature to fully engage both to help create movement, and control that movement. It requires hip mobility to swing unloaded leg through It requires lower body control to perfom a dead start overhead lunge from the kneeling position.
And in order to succeed at this with a significant load, it requires you full attention at every stage of the lift.
And done well, a lift can take full minute to complete.
So every part of the body is in motion, the mind must be fully involved in the lift and there’s a stack of time under tension.
If every there was a lift that helps an athlete learn awareness of their body and its weak links, this is it.
Hence the title of “Glue”
Here’s a a very quick presentation on the lift from a workshop a few years ago:
I’ll be doing a series on the “Glue” exercises that we use at Wild Geese.
It’s a category that really needs better understood and is what most people really mean when they talk about “core” training
Regards
Dave Hedges www.Wg-Fit.com
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