The gliding discs are a slightly more obscure piece of equipment.
Often participants haven't seen them before when I first bring them to class.
Despite this they did get to second place on my list.
I'm sure you will understand why...
The gliding disc is definately a fan favourite. It is by far the most popular piece of equipment I bring to class on a regular basis. They cause lots of excitement in all my group classes and are my most requested piece of equipment. Without fail there will be fewer groans, less talking, more concentration and lots of 'thank you I enjoyed that' at the end of class. If you want to spice up a class, progress an exercise or do something a little different at home I can highly recommend a glider session. Without a doubt they ramp up the sweat and increase the burn.
Despite this they didn't get my top spot for one reason and one reason only - they are mainly used to increase the difficulty of an exercise they can't really be used as way to assist, adapt or modify an exercise. This for me reduces their usefulness and is why they aren't my absolute go to option.
Try placing the gliding disc under the working foot when performing leg slides, curtsey squats or lunges and see if you can go that little bit further or deeper. place them underneath the hands for arms slides and ab slides. Try under the toes for superman, half roll backs with leg slide and plank to pike. Get ready to feel the burn!
My glides are purple and large enough to place the whole foot or hand on and they are from a range of equipment by Leslie Bender. They have many other names such as glider discs, gliders, sliders or slider discs. They might be a little obsure but they are definately becoming more and more popular and mainstream wich means easier to find, I recently bought a pack of four small discs for use in The Studio from Aldi!
There are circular discs, oval discs, triangular discs, octagonal shaped discs and they come in a range of size and colours. It doesn't matter though what they look like as they all do pretty much the same thing.
The only thing to be aware of is that you do need different materials depending on if you want to use your discs on carpet or hard flooring. So make sure you check the description, the gliders I have for class are for hard floors and the company sells two completely different versions for this reason, some available are dual sided or as in the case of the Aldi ones I simply flip them upside down and used the shiny top side for carpet.
The gliding disc is starting to increase in popularity and as such is a little easier to find as always Amazon has many, many different options and I have regularly seen them on the aisles of various supermarkets such as ASDA, Tesco and Aldi. They have a couple of different names, I have seen them called gliding discs, glides, gliders and sliders.
Now which exercise will you try first?
Victoria xx
P.S.
Always make sure you have some way of 'breaking' when using a glide just incase they run away from you and I usually recommened socks off for the same reason.
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