Karate Planking Video: How to Plank

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By David Younglove
6th Degree Black Belt - USA Karate

From a fitness standpoint, one thing that's going to help you develop your core strength, which is going to help you in your stances and all of your martial arts training as you move forward would be to develop your ability to hold your plank for a longer period of time.

Now, you're not going to be able to hold this technique for a long time right away. So start out in small increments, maybe 15 seconds at a time - maybe 30 seconds at at time. You're goal is to work out to a minimum of a minute and national trainers say once you get out to a 2-minute plankability, you start to really develop your core strength and that's really going to help you in your training. Let me demonstrate how you're going to do this and I'll give you some variations.

As we move down to the floor, we're going to start out onto our elbows and then curl your toes underneath. When you first start out, you may need to be on your knees. One thing you want to think about is it's very important to stay flat from your seat all the way up to your shoulder blades.

As you progress we want to move all the way into a full plank, where we're holding our bodies nice and flat, pushing back into your heels and keeping that seat all the way up to your shoulder blades nice and flat. We don't want our seat up too high or our seat down too low. We want it nice and flat. Again start in 15 seconds, 30 seconds, maybe a minute and then work up to holding that 2 minutes or more.

Keep in mind, the record is 5 hours and 19 minutes held by a former Marine like me.

David Younglove

USA Karate & Platinum Yoga

Rosemount MN 55068