RMT® Club Figure 8s: Get Your Club Now

This full body workout exercise will help you harness the power in your hips, breath, and left/right side balance. 

Read Video Text Below:

Hey, David Weck here, I'm at Crossfit 619.

Today I'm going to teach you an exercise we call the figure eights. This exercise will help you transfer your weight from right to left with balance and strength and power through the hips to create mobility through the chest, the thorastic cavity and the shoulders and tie in hand to feet.

Whole body, strength, balance and power.

The exercise looks like this, plant straight ahead and make figure eight movements. Really forces you to brace your breath and you'll feel the muscles in between your ribs, they're going to stretch and you're going to strengthen. Here's how we break this exercise down. We’re use different footwork to learn it. So instead of facing ahead, I'm going to face to the side and we're going to bring the club to my side so it's where it will be if I were facing ahead. I'm just going to lift it up and make a circle, so its coming down as it's on this backside and I just come back up to that center and I chamber that. Now, switch the feet, bring it up and back and down, circle, chamber. Switch it, just get comfortable with that pattern; its like this infinity that's wrapping around your body on both sides.

When I get it to square up, I just put those steps together. I come here, I can park it, and you just want to groove that pattern right there and now, once I have the pattern. Now I put speed into it and the club's going to be silent. You're going to make no sound with the club because it's the centrifugal force pulling the weight out to the top of the club head. So here it is; you will feel your weight shift. You will feel your gluteal activation, you want to really tie in your power to the center and here's where it's really cool: We're going to use this spiraling technique with the club where I'm going to combine rotation with that figure eight and that's going to make this move super fluid and it will help you groove better with the sports where you're holding a racket or a bat or a lacrosse stick or whatever it is. The more coordination you have here, the better you'll be at that.

So what I'm going to do is when I bring the club over here, I'm going to rotate the club so I'm rotating and it's almost like I'm winding up the body here to really pull in up and then I rotate the other way. You can almost think of it as letting the thumbs be the tail so when you're doing that figure eight, you just turn it so that the thumbs are behind and the knuckles are leading and you're going to find that groove pattern really clean so that we have this spiraling action that's smooth, and smooth is how we move really fast.

Now we have to do both sides and it's going to feel different, so tack it back and forth between the sides. You can break it down into the simple steps if necessary, maybe for the non-dominant side and then go nice and slow, so its like "Okay, I bring it up and there, park it. Up and there" and I'm going to use that same rotational capacity where the thumbs are going to come behind and that centrifugal force. You don't want to hit your leg; it's soft so not necessarily catastrophic if you do hit the leg, but you want to go slow enough before you up the speed. We always need to maintain club control so we don’t injure ourselves, anything else, anyone else or break anything.

So that's the patterning. Now what you can do as well with this, once you get that groove with two hands, now you can start to do it with one hand as well and you can keep that center. You have to make sure you're not sweaty, don't release the club, got to go slow enough and you got it. Don't release it, but using that single hand now, come up and learn how to do it on that side and on that non-dominant side; you'll feel the difference. Two hands together is going to groove it and teach it to you to create that great mobility through the shoulder. If you want to throw a jab, that pronation is going to create the distance, this will help expand and give you a better jab and better shoulder health. You'll be able to follow through on a throw better too and, like I said from the beginning, the breath control, the expanded breathing, that'll have health benefits and performance benefits.

If you liked the clip, follow us, like us, ask questions, we'll answer them. I will see you next time, thanks for coming in and watching.

Learn More About the RMT® Club

• Running Technique: The Striking Step

• Proper Body Alignment Tip: The Power Position