Bear Crawl – Improve Strength and Coordination - Level 1

Bear Crawl is a full body speed, strength, stability, mobility, and coordination fundamental movement pattern that improves your overall athleticism. Bear Crawl is a locomotion drill where players must coordinate their hands and feet to move as quickly as possible from point A to point B.

It's a fantastic exercise to use in your warmup, an awesome conditioning activity to increase your muscular endurance, and fun racing activity that you can use during practices, especially with youth teams, to blow off some steam. You can race against yourself for time, against an opponent, or in teams as a relay race.

Be sure to practice bear crawl moving in all directions; forwards, backwards, lateral to the right, and lateral to the left because each variation provides a unique movement challenge. The more ways that a player can learn to move athletically the greater their physical literacy skills become which allows them to pick up the baseball specific skills of throwing, hitting, fielding, and catching much faster and perform them to a much higher degree than the competition.

Be sure to watch the video because I compete in a Bear challenge where if I fail, I get 8 soccer balls kicked as hard as they can at my body.