Planking is an incredible exercise – but only if you get it right

Monique Eastwood, the trainer responsible for the toned muscles of Stanley Tucci, Anne Hathaway and Emily Blunt, loves planks. But it’s a position that is unique to each individual, she points out. “It presents a different challenge depending on your body type,” says Eastwood.

First off, the less you weigh, the easier it will be. “I happen to be quite compact and balanced, so my plank is going to be a lighter and easier effort for me,” she says. “If you are someone who is a little bit more loaded on the top or bottom half, your isometric plank is going to be a bigger effort.”

Extra weight isn’t the only challenge, though. The basic shape to aim for is a neutral spine that avoids tucking or arching the pubic bone. If you are hypermobile (very flexible joints), it will be harder to keep your spine neutral.

“Your abdominals have to work even harder to pull back and stabilise your spine,” says Eastwood. “If you have a rigid spine, more solid, without those hypermobile areas, it’s going to be easier for you to be in that place, than someone fighting that gravitational pull all the time.”

Many men have more upper body strength, which means they are less likely to strain their wrists and shoulders. Using your forearms, instead of straight arms, will “stop you overloading your wrists and stooping into your chest muscles more than you should be,” says Eastwood.

“I’d bring you up to straight arms on your wrists when I felt your back could take the strain off the wrist and elbows and hold you in that position,” she adds.

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If your deep core strength needs building up, you can also drop onto your knees. Then, to build strength, Eastwood recommends lifting and lowering your knees, remembering to engage your core, glutes and legs.

“Hold a box position as well with the knees in line with the hips, so on all fours,” she advises. “Feel like you want to shift into your legs, because most people want to shift on to their arms, and you really want to get them towards the lower half of the body where there is more bigger muscle groups like the glutes and quads.”

Then you can play around with holding it a bit longer. “As soon as you feel the body is shifting forward and dumping on the wrists, and the shoulders have lost their stability, drop the knees down,” says Eastwood. Other things to be aware of include not cricking the neck backwards, or dropping the head too low.

Once you’ve built up the strength in the transverse abdominis (a deep abdominal muscle), and obliques, you can start to do more funky planks.

Eastwood loves knee to shoulder moves, walking one leg out a bit to challenge the core, or raising an arm up, and then raising the opposite leg. “So you’re really challenging yourself on the unilateral muscles,” she says. “That’s quite challenging.”

Not one that I’ll be placing a bet on myself to hold for three-minutes any time soon.

The Telegraph, London

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