I happen to love doing Turkish Get-Ups so I tend to think that everyone will. But it seems that I often hear a dull groan resonate in the room when I tell my class it’s time for Turkish Get-Ups. When we spend a little extra time working on some of the finer details of Get-Up technique I get at least a few people saying they now enjoy them. So I thought I’d share some of those tips with you to help you fall in love with the Turkish Get-Up as well. Already love the Get-Up? That’s great! You can still use these tips to find ways to improve and love it even more.

Turkish Get-Ups are simple awesomeness for a few reasons.

First of all, they are a full-body strength exercise. If you don’t feel that your entire body has worked after doing get-ups, then you are either using too light of a weight or you are in need of some instruction from an RKC to make sure that you are using proper form. Think about the various steps to the get-up. Pressing the weight overhead and holding it there for the entire exercise is certainly an amazing shoulder, arm and back smoker. Sitting up to the elbow, the hand and sweeping the leg are remarkable for working the abs. Then you’ve got your lunge with an overhead lockout – if that doesn’t work your legs, butt, arms and back all at once, I don’t know what will. And all of these body parts are being worked in each step, not just in the examples mentioned.

In addition to the amazing strength benefits, the Turkish Get-up can also help you discover asymmetries in strength, mobility and flexibility. For example, you can examine your thoracic mobility when you sit up to the elbow and then post to the hand. If you notice that it’s easier for you to pack the shoulders tightly and get thoracic extension on the left vs. the right, then you know you’ve got an asymmetry issue you need to address. Likewise, if you do the high bridge and notice that you can lift higher or with more ease on one side, again you’ve got an asymmetry to address. When you address your body’s asymmetries, you improve not only your Turkish Get-Up, but you improve in everything you do.

The Get-Up is also very powerful for full-body stability. Again, think about how you fix that weight overhead and then try to tell me you didn’t challenge your shoulder stability. Core stability can easily be seen when sweeping the leg through, especially when done from the high bridge position. If you have trouble bringing that leg through to the half-kneeling windmill position, then you might have a core instability.

And no one can argue that a well performed Turkish Get-Up, especially when done with a really heavy weight, just looks impressive and uber cool!

Enough about the accolades of doing Get-Ups; I could go on for days!  Stay tuned for tips on how to improve your Turkish Get-Up!

~Shari