Suspension training is the ideal way to build core body strength, alongside muscular and joint stability, and is a form of unstable training that works by using your own body weight. Once you’ve mastered sling trainers, your next step is to move up to a pulley string trainer which features a deflection pulley to enable even greater instability and more demanding exercises including rotating and alternating exercises.
Some of the best workouts using pulley sling trainers are discussed below:
1. Vertical row
Your pulley sling trainer, e.g. aeroSling ELITE from aerobis.com, needs to anchored very high for the vertical row exercise and you need to be in sitting position with your arms extended, then you can start rowing in a vertical move with elbows aligned to your trunk until reaching the stage of full vertical suspension. Once this exercise is mastered in full, move on to unilateral rowing to increase difficulty even more.
2. Pulley sling trainer power presses
Begin the exercise by holding onto both handles of your sling trainer and extend both arms out in front at shoulder height. Just bend one arm and bring your elbow back to your body and then repeat. The difficult of this exercise can be adjusted by using weight vests. An advanced exercise to trial out once the power press is mastered is the swimmer press, where you keep elbows in a semi-flexed, fully extended position and circle arms through an entire rotation. The body should be in a straight line for these swimmer arm circles, although difficulty can be increased by leaning a little.
3. Body plank
Fix your pulley sling in a high position and while maintaining body tension lie down on the ground on your back and place feet into the pulleys. Take up the body plank position, with your core body lifted off the ground from the hips, while maintaining body tension to achieve a straight line. Hold arms upright above body and alternate forwards and backwards, then move into the swimmer exercise and alternate legs up and down. For the pendulum exercise, it’s necessary to swing legs laterally, while the body is maintained in a straight line.
Upgrading your sling trainer to a pulley sling trainer gives you further training options. with a normal sling trainer you’re limited to straps which are fixed at the same anchor and need to be at the same length at all times. With a pulley sling trainer you can use the deflection pulley to increase the level of your instability training, using your body weight to counter this higher level of instability. This increases your coordination levels and the pulley sling training you carry out gives you more options to build in the rotating or alternating exercises which cannot be carried out with normal sling trainers.
