Looking at the Transverse Plane from 30,000 Feet

Many of you who have caught one of my live events in the last year or so have heard me say that I’m “All In” when it comes to training in the transverse plane. Rotation seems to be the lost plane of movement for a number of our athletes and patients.

I have been just as guilty as anyone with regards to neglecting training rotation properly. Looking back, I find that in the past I have talked the talk, but haven’t really walked the walk. Meaning, I have talked about incorporating rotation with my athletes, but honestly, I had been basically putting it into training sessions as a token to basically “check the box.”

About a year ago, I started playing with the idea of training my female athletes who were in pain or had movement dysfunction strictly in the transverse plane. I began taping their spiral line and prescribing movements in their corrective sessions that were only rotationally based. What I quickly found was that everyone started turning the corner and getting better much more quickly than I had seen previously.

I believe that this is for 2 reasons:

1. Many athletes (especially track athletes) are not trained well in the transverse plane in high school or in their rehab settings. So, there’s a lot of upside when you actually dig in and work on it.
2. The transverse plane incorporates some components of the frontal and sagittal planes within its motions. The same is not true of the other two planes. Thus, if you only have 1 plane of motion to train, working in the transverse plane will actually train at least some of all 3 planes of motion.

What I am finding with my seminars is that when I talk about rotational training, I get a lot of head nods and agreement that we should be training more in the transverse plane, but when asked to put it into practice, very few people know how to take people through a high quality progression in the transverse plane.

So, we are going to go through a high level, 30,000 foot view of rotational training to help us understand when and how to begin to put the various pieces together. As an overview, I’ll talk through some progressions, but just give suggestions on movement strategies for this post and can be more specific in certain areas in future posts.

The simple progression looks something like this:

1. Mobility
2. Breathing
3. Neurodevelopmental Sequencing
4. Anti Rotation
5. Rotation

If we are going to be methodical (which we should be), each of these can be broken down a number of ways, so I’ll attempt to shed some light on it here.

Mobility

Gray Cook has said for years that in order to have true stability, we must first have mobility. Without mobility, there is no possible way that we can rotate efficiently or authentically.
Prior to performing any rotational movements, we are obligated to check mobility in the thoracic spine, hip and lower leg. That’s not to say that we can’t or won’t see rotational restrictions in other part of the body, but I find that it is very common to see rotational restrictions in the thoracic spine, hip internal and/or external rotators, and Tibial internal rotation. If we are restricted in any of these areas, we will never rotate well.

Breathing

If we don’t know how to breathe through our diaphragm, we will never truly have inner unit core and trunk stabilization. Do not skip this step.

Neurodevelopmental Sequencing

Usually after clearing mobility, I move to rolling patterns. I find that most people can make that transition pretty efficiently. But, if they can’t we need to understand that we can always regress the movement in order to allow them to progress.

A sample progression could look something like this:

1. Prone head rotations
2. Barrel Rolling
3. Rolling from the side
4. Rolling
5. Crawling

Anti-rotation

This is an often forgotten or misunderstand component of rotational training. In order to create quality rotation, you must first know how to prevent poor rotation. I can’t emphasize this enough. If you have a baseball player who is struggling to hit because of an inconsistent swing, is it because he doesn’t know how to swing the bat well? Or, is it that he doesn’t know how to prevent himself from creating the poor swings that lead him to poor quality at bats? I suggest that an inconsistency for that athlete is likely caused by their inability to prevent bad rotation rather than not being able to create good quality rotation.

A simple anti-rotation might look something like this:

• Sphinx Arm Raise
• Quadruped Arm Raise
• Quadruped Leg Raise
• Quadruped
• Pallof Progressoin
  • Tall Kneeling
  • Half Kneeling
  • Split Stance
  • Lunge Stance
  • Staggered Stance
  • Single Leg Stance
• TRX Rip Trainer Press (or Pull)
• TRX Rip Trainer Pull and Row
• Plank with Lateral Sandbag Drag
• Single Arm TRX Row

Rotation

Now that you have worked through the anti-rotation progression your athlete is going to be ready to perform rotational movements. Just as the above progressions aren’t all encompassing and you can feel free to fill in your preferences as you feel appropriate, feel free to do it here just the same.

Here is a sample progression:

• Cable Chops/Lifts
  • Tall Kneeling
  • Half Kneeling
  • Staggered Stance
  • Lunge Stance
  • Symmetrical Stance
  • Single Leg Stance
• KB Windmill
  • Half Kneeling
  • Standing
• TRX Rip Trainer Rotate + Press
• TRX Rip Trainer Slap Shot
• Sandbag Rotational Carry
• Sandbag Rotational Lunge

This is not meant to be an all inclusive list of movements in the transverse plane, but it should give you a good understanding as to how you should properly be progressing your clients, patients and athletes through rotational movements. If you get in a hurry and skip over any of them, you will find that someday you will regret it. The system works, stick to it.

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