Bear Crawls

What the bear crawl actually trains

A bear crawl is a quadrupedal locomotion drill where you support your weight on your hands and toes with the knees hovering just above the floor, and travel forward by moving opposite hand and foot together.

The honest description is that it is a plank that moves. The abdominals and obliques do most of the work, and their job is to stop things happening rather than to produce movement: no sagging at the lower back, no rotation as each limb lifts, no hips swinging side to side.

The shoulders take the second largest share. Holding a broad, stable upper back while alternately unloading each hand is a genuine scapular stability demand, and it is the part most people feel the next day. The quads and hip flexors work to keep the knees hovering, which is why the position becomes uncomfortable long before you are out of breath.

What a bear crawl does not do is build muscle. There is no external load, no meaningful range of motion at any joint, and no way to progress the resistance except by adding a plate to your back. Schoenfeld and colleagues found a dose response between weekly hard resistance training sets and hypertrophy, and crawling twenty metres is not a set in that sense.

So what is it for? Two things, both worth having. It teaches you to hold a braced trunk while your limbs move independently, which transfers to carrying, pressing overhead and almost everything done standing on one leg. And it is a good warm-up: it raises your temperature, wakes up the shoulders and gets the trunk switched on before you press anything.

Setting up and executing

Start on hands and knees with the hands directly under the shoulders and the knees under the hips, toes tucked.

Push the floor away so the upper back is broad rather than sagging between the shoulder blades.

Brace the abdominals and lift the knees a couple of centimetres. Hold that for a breath before moving, because that hover is the whole exercise.

Move the right hand and the left foot forward together, in small steps. Then the left hand and the right foot.

Keep the hips low and level throughout. If they rise or swing, shorten the steps.

Continue for the set distance or time, then crawl backwards to return.

The mistakes that cost you the most

Hips riding high is the fault that empties the exercise of value. When the backside comes up, the trunk no longer has to resist anything and you are doing an awkward shuffle. If you cannot keep the knees close to the floor, crawl for less distance rather than crawling badly.

Rocking side to side is the second version of the same failure. Escamilla and colleagues, across their electromyographic studies of abdominal exercises, found that trunk demand depends heavily on how an exercise resists motion rather than on how much movement occurs. A bear crawl works because you are refusing to rotate.

Moving the same side hand and foot together makes the crawl stable and easy. Opposite limbs are what create the rotational challenge, and getting the timing right is most of the skill.

Reaching too far with each step forces the hips up and pushes the shoulders in front of the hands. Small steps.

And collapsing between the shoulder blades, letting the chest sink towards the floor, hands the load to passive shoulder structures. Ludewig and Reynolds documented the association between scapular positioning and shoulder problems, which supports actively pushing the floor away rather than hanging in the position.

Sets, reps and rest by goal

This is measured in distance or time, so treat the numbers as such.

For general trunk work in a muscle building phase, three efforts of around twenty metres, done slowly and cleanly, with a minute between them. Speed is not the goal; position is.

If you are using it to support strength training, three sets of thirty seconds crawling slowly, forwards and backwards, with ninety seconds rest. Slower is harder here, which is the opposite of most people's instinct.

In a fat loss phase, four bouts of thirty to forty seconds continuous with short rest works as part of a circuit. It will get your heart rate up. It will not do anything a longer walk would not do more comfortably.

The progression is not more distance. Once you can crawl twenty metres with the hips low and no swaying, the next step is a plate on your back, a slower tempo, or a harder variation such as backwards or lateral crawling. Adding distance mostly trains your tolerance for wrist discomfort.

Two or three exposures a week is plenty, and they can be short.

Where it fits in your split

Either as a warm-up before pressing or as a trunk finisher at the end.

On push, pull and legs it fits at the end of push day, or as part of the warm-up. On a bro split it suits shoulder or abs day. On an upper and lower split, put it in the full body or upper session. On a bodyweight programme it earns more of a place than usual, simply because your options for loaded trunk work are limited.

The warm-up case is the strongest one. Two lengths of a gym before pressing gets the shoulders moving, the trunk braced and your temperature up in about ninety seconds, which is more useful than most of what people do in a warm-up.

As a finisher it is fine, though not obviously better than a hard set of ab wheel rollouts or a loaded carry, both of which progress more easily. What it should not be is the centrepiece of a session.

Variations worth knowing

The bear crawl hold, staying still with the knees hovering, is where beginners should start, because it isolates the position from the coordination.

The backward bear crawl is harder to coordinate and naturally keeps the hips lower, which makes it the better version for most people once the forward one is comfortable.

The lateral crawl travels sideways and adds a shoulder abduction demand that the forward version does not have.

Adding a shoulder tap at intervals converts it into a static anti-rotation drill with a much clearer trunk challenge.

Bear crawls with push-ups add a pressing element at set intervals, which turns a positional drill into a conditioning complex.

And a weighted bear crawl, with a plate balanced on your back, is the only version that meaningfully progresses the resistance, and it is also the only one that stays challenging for long.

What the evidence says

McGill's work on core training argues that the trunk's job is stiffness and endurance rather than producing movement, and that training should reflect that. A bear crawl is close to a textbook example: nothing about it asks the spine to move, and everything about it asks the spine to stay still while the limbs do not.

Escamilla and colleagues measured muscle activation across a wide range of commercial and traditional abdominal exercises and found substantial differences between them, with the strongest trunk demands coming from exercises that resist extension and rotation rather than from repeated flexion. That is the category a crawl belongs to.

Their second study on traditional and nontraditional abdominal exercises reinforced the same theme, showing that upper and lower abdominal activation depends more on the mechanical demand of the position than on the name of the exercise.

Marchetti and colleagues examined muscle activation during isometric ab wheel rollouts and found high abdominal demand in positions that resist trunk extension, which is mechanically similar to a low hipped crawl.

Ludewig and Reynolds reviewed the association between scapular kinematics and shoulder pathology, which supports pushing the floor away rather than sinking between the shoulder blades.

Cholewicki and colleagues measured lumbar loads during heavy lifting and found spinal position under load matters considerably, which is the principle behind refusing to let the lower back sag.

Schoenfeld and colleagues found a dose response between weekly hard sets and hypertrophy, which is why this belongs in your warm-up rather than in your muscle building volume.

Common questions

Is the bear crawl a good ab exercise?

It is a reasonable anti-extension and anti-rotation drill, and it is free. But it is difficult to progress, since the only real levers are tempo, distance and adding a plate. If growing your abdominals is the goal, weighted crunches and ab wheel rollouts progress far more cleanly.

How high should my hips be?

Low. The knees should hover a couple of centimetres off the floor and stay there. Once the hips rise above the shoulders the trunk demand largely disappears. If the position is too hard, hold it still instead of travelling.

Why do my shoulders and wrists ache?

The shoulders because holding a braced upper back while alternately unloading each hand is a real stability demand, and that is the exercise working. The wrists because bearing weight on an extended wrist is uncomfortable for many people. Crawling on fists or parallettes solves that entirely.

How is this different from bear crawls with push-ups?

The push-up version adds a pressing element at set intervals, which raises the conditioning demand and the fatigue but does not change the crawl itself. If you want a position drill, crawl. If you want a breathless complex, add the push-ups. There is little reason to do both.

Does crawling burn fat?

Not in any way specific to crawling. It raises your heart rate and adds to your total activity, which is all any exercise does. Effort and total volume across the week decide the outcome, and a longer walk is easier to sustain than a longer crawl.