When you’re doing Levitation exercises on the Ladder you’re strengthening your posterior chain: primarily your back muscles and your glutes. And it’s called “levitation” because you’re floating up against gravity. Then wouldn’t using a strap be a little bit of a cheat?
It could but it isn’t in this case.
This video makes the exercise look deceptively easy. There’s alot going on. One of the most important aspects of core strength is stability. In this exercise you’ve got to stabilize in all three planes of motion.
If you put your arms out to the sides, that is your frontal plane. Anything in front or behind you is your sagittal plane. And when you turn to either the left or the right, that’s your transverse plane. In this side lying exercise on the Ladder, keeping the legs at the same level as the torso (and vise-versa) is stability in the frontal plane. The movement of your legs and upper body is in your sagittal plane and you’ve got to stabilize your pelvis so it stays perpendicular to the padded rung.
The Waterfall series on the Ladder or the Archway is the absolute best for pure front of the body core strengthening. While you’re working the same muscles as a sit-up or crunch, you’re asking your body to do the same thing in the opposite direction. The extra space you gain by being off the ground allows you to add fun variety, like Press Ups.
There are 6 ways you can move your spine. One of them, circumduction, is a circular movement of the spine, either internally or externally. The idea of this exercise is that its an internal circumduction if your spine was twice as long.
With internal circumduction, your spine makes a circle around the mid-line of your body at the level of the solar plexus, with the two ends of your spine staying in the same place. This exercise does the same thing, but the shoulder girdle is what’s making the circle around the mid-line of your body.