What if Just One Exercise Could Meet All Your Fitness Needs… including Muscle, Strength, and Conditioning?

By Elliot Newman

You’re about to discover an exercise that gives you more than it takes from you.

This is certainly NOT true of all exercises.

For example…

My favorite exercise is the Deadlift. In my opinion it is the best test of strength. There’s a loaded bar on the floor. Can you stand up with it?

That’s it.

A brutal test of total body strength.

And yet…

The deadlift is absolutely NOT the single best exercise for health & fitness.

Why?

Several reasons:

• It requires real skill to do safely
• Done incorrectly, the risk of lower back injury is higher than with many other exercises
• It’s great for building strength, good for building muscle, but it ain’t no conditioning exercise!
• Because the bar is in your hands, deadlifting is very draining on your Central Nervous System (meaning, if your programming isn’t good, it can burn you out really fast)

So, what is the best exercise for health & fitness – if you want the perfect blend of strength, muscle and conditioning (including fat loss if you need to drop some pounds)?

The answer is:

Crawling!

Why Crawling?

Several key reasons:

• It gives way more than it takes from you (I’ve done some very hard crawling sessions in my time, and I’ve never, ever, had any aches or pains from doing so. Nor have I ever felt tired the day afterwards!)
• There’s no eccentric motion with Crawling (which is a huge part of the reason as to why it doesn’t beat you up, make you feel sore and so on)
• It makes you more balanced and co-ordinated
• It can build A LOT of strength
• It can build plenty of muscle
• It can torch body-fat
• It makes you resilient, by building reflexive strength (reflexive strength being the type of strength your body subconsciously knows it needs to use, before it needs to use it! Examples? If you fall and catch  yourself with your hands, so you don’t hit your face, that’s REFLEXIVE STRENGTH in action! If, on the other hand, you fall and knock your teeth out, you Reflexive Strength is not up to par! Now you know why people’s biggest FEAR is FALLING, once they hit 60+… because there Reflexive Strength erodes over time)
• It ties your left shoulder to your right hip, and your right shoulder to your left hip (the body is an ‘X’, hence why this is important)
• It acts as a ‘reset’ (meaning: whenever you crawl with good form, you are rewiring your brain, improving your posture, and generally making yourself healthier. Most exercises in the gym cannot say the same!)
• You can do it pretty much anywhere, and you don’t need any specialized equipment (check the ‘quick n dirty’ image at the start of this blog post. That’s me crawling in my living room/home gym!)

I could go on, but I think you get the idea. Crawling is an amazing exercise!

And, the fact that it can build strength, muscle and conditioning all at once makes it truly one-of-a-kind.

To answer the stupid, yet kind-of-fun question of: 

“If I could only do one exercise for the rest of my life, what woudl it be?”

My answer is:

CRAWLING.

Sure, I love the deadlift more. But for HEALTH as well as Performance, Crawling is the King.

How to Crawl…

I’ll show you 5 ways to crawl…

Please ignore any crawling you see done with the ASS UP and the HEAD DOWN. This is just stupid. And “YES” – the commonly performed ‘Bear Crawl’ falls into that category.

To crawl properly – with great posture, in an athletic way – crawl like A MAN. Crawl with your butt down, and your head up!

The Easiest Way to Crawl is The Baby Crawl:

Technique:

• Look straight ahead
• Drag the tops of your feet on the floor
• Move your right arm and left leg together, and your left arm and right leg together
• Keep your mouth shut and breathe through your nose

I highly recommend building up to being able to Baby Crawl non-stop for 10 minutes, before you attempt any of the other crawling variations!

And, if you can, build up to 20 minutes. 20 minutes of Baby Crawling is surprisingly challenging.

The Leopard Crawl:

Technique:

• Look straight ahead
• Keep your knees just off the floor
• Move your right arm and left leg together, and your left arm and right leg together
• Keep your knees inside your arms
• Keep your mouth shut and breathe through your nose

The Leopard Crawl is way harder than Baby Crawling, because you’re supporting so much more of your bodyweight, on just your hands and feet.

Leopard Crawling Forwards can add a ton of muscle to your quads. Backwards it challenges the shoulders and triceps in ways you have to try to understand.

You can make it harder by crawling against chain, or crawling backwards uphill. Or, BOTH!

The Spiderman Crawl

Technique:

• Look straight ahead
• Keep your knees off the floor
• Move your right arm and left leg together, and your left arm and right leg together
• Keep your knees outside your arms
• Keep your mouth shut and breathe through your nose

Everybody wants to try this crawling variation this first.

But, don’t!

Pay your dues. DO NOT attempt the Spiderman Crawl until you are very good at the Leopard Crawl (which may take months or even years).

Why?

Because it’s highly unlikely that you’ll have the core strength to do it effectively. And, if you don’t, you hips will sway excessively from side-to-side, which isn’t good for your lower back.

Once you can Spiderman Crawl with good technique – you can do it forwards or backwards. You can do it backwards uphill. You can do it against chain. Just make sure you build up to it and video your form when you do it, to check you’re ready!

Side-to-Side Crawling

Technique:

• Look straight ahead
• You can do it Baby Crawl Style – with your knees on the floor. OR: Leopard/Spiderman Style with your knees off the floor
• Move your right arm and left leg together, and your left arm and right leg together
• Keep your mouth shut and breathe through your nose

This has a totally different feeling to crawling forwards or backwards. Yet, it has all the same benefits – building strength, muscle and conditioning, make you more resilient, co-ordinated, balanced and so forth.

And, finally…

Axial Crawling

Note: skip to 3.40 in the video, to see my buddy Aleks demonstrating how to do Axial Crawling…

Technique:

• Look in the direction you are crawling
• You can do it Baby Crawl Style – with your knees on the floor. OR: Leopard/Spiderman Style with your knees off the floor
• Move your right arm and left leg together, and your left arm and right leg together
• Keep your mouth shut and breathe through your nose

How to Get the Most Out of Crawling…

Ok. So, you know the basic benefits of crawling.

And, you know 5 variations.

The big question is:

“How should you program your crawling?”

Well, there are many options.

The simplest way to get started, is this:

Pick a set number of days a week that you are going to crawl… anywhere from 3 to 7. I recommend 7 (because it’s so easy to recover from), but if you can only commit to 3, that’s ok too.

Then, set your timer for 10 minutes and CRAWL.

In any way you like, so long as your technique is PERFECT.

The idea is to build up to 10 minutes crawling non-stop, baby crawl style first. Then Leopard Crawl.

Do this and you’ll know what it means to be strong, resilient and ‘fit.’

It really is that simple.

All you have to do is commit.

Try it for the next month and let me know how you get on? It’ll change your life. I promise.

And, if you already have another workout/sport going on – who cares? Do the crawling anyway, at a different time of day. It’ll actually improve your performance during those other activities, guaran-freakin-teed.

Got comments or questions?

Leave them below, and I’ll get back to you ASAP.