by Carrie Lane, Director of Sport Performance 

Remember those crab walk races you had when you were kids?  Our Crab Position Hip Lift exercise is bringing that back-- but without the awkward racing you had to do.  As we get older, we often neglect the backside, but these muscles are crucial for movement, posture, and muscular balance.   This exercise is another good one to add to your general strength (bodyweight) circuits.
Focus on lifting and lowering the hips and chest at the same rate.  Activate your glutes and muscles around your shoulders to achieve this hip/chest lift, while keeping the low back muscles relaxed.  Here we show the more challenging, single leg version.  Click below the video to see a simpler modification. 

Here we are, the final summit push of our strength training blog.  Of course, it involves the most grueling and most fun phase of training-- Strength Endurance.  This is where it all comes together for an alpinist.  Strength Endurance encompasses your ability to ascend and descend under load (the load is your pack) all day long, while executing intermittent powerful movements, and quickly recovering from those movements.  Referring back to our riverbed analogy from part 3, once you have taught those riverbed hoppers in your neuromuscular system to travel efficiently (power phase), and then you recruited a lot of them (strength phase), you can finally train them to keep going for miles and miles while utilizing fuel as economically as possible (strength endurance).