I've been having spine issues that came from being overly aggressive doing a plank variation ("stir the pot") and I'm wondering whether planks are necessary in general. I never get this sort of injury from swimming (while I do swim in a style that emphasizes engaging the core.)
Just curious if others have experience in not doing any specialized core training other than what you get from doing hard swimming (and whether that feels like enough)? I want to reduce risk of injury but at the same time don't want to set myself up for even worse instability from losing core strength that I feel comes from doing the planks.
I have some serious spinal arthritis. Prevents me from running at all and pains me to bike more than a few miles as well. I have always done pushups, never planks. It seems to me it's just a static pushup. I generally do upwards of 100 a day and at times have gotten over 5000 per month. I find both pushups and swimming are good for the spine because they work the core supporting the spinal column.
I went from an out of shape blob to having very solid core strength in a little over year, mostly by doing lots of intense swim interval training (USPRT). I did some mild core exercises (crunches) at first, but eventually gave that up and just swam. I think you get a lot of core exercise swimming hard.
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Diet was obviously a big part of the weight loss, but you can't diet your way to a solid core.
I've been seeing some reconsiderations of the almighty plank, in a lot of fitness circles, lately. For example, I saw one video where a couple of osteopaths (I think) were saying rather than trying to hold the plank for longer and longer, one ought to do a series of shorter static planks (so, Sumo, more like what you are saying with pushups). I think planks are probably okay but, I wouldn't try to rely totally on them to build core strength.
I have had really good effects from a Pilates mat sequence, done regularly. And swimming with good posture and core focus, does certainly do one good, IMO.
With the static plank, once you've mastered over a minute it becomes more of a muscular endurance exercise, and the effort / core strength trade off drops off.
