Bear Crawling

If you've never done a bear crawl, you should give it a go. Start on flat grass and go forwards crawling on your hands and feet (knees off the ground and butt low). Then try the same thing but going backwards, make sure you keep that butt low! Too easy? Now try a backwards bear crawl up a hill...a big steep hill!

During our Tough Mudder training last year, we were introduced to the backwards bear crawl up a hill. During most sessions we would be crawling up a fairly steep hill which was probably around 40m from bottom to top. and that was tough. During some of out other sessions at a different location we would crawl backwards up a hill no where near as steep and only around 20m long...barely even a challenge after the first one.

Bear crawling pretty much became a staple exercise in our workouts. So much so that we joked we would cross the line of Tough Mudder as a team doing a backwards bear crawl. Carrying on from Tough Mudder, we have kept up the crawling, and on the weekend just gone, three of us decided to take it to the extreme and backwards bear crawl up Mount Street, clue in the name 'Mount' as to how steep this hill is. Most people walk this hill, the really keen ones will run it, so the fact that we decided to bear crawl it...nuts!

As expected, it was brutal!! Throughout the crawl everything was burning, including the lungs but what stands out to me the most is how sore my hamstrings were for the two days to follow. It takes a lot to give me DOM's and to be in amount of stiffness I was in for those following two days tells me just how tough that hill was.

So want to challenge your whole body? Go bear crawl!