The Amazing Spider-Man

The Spider-Man Drill should be familiar to all serious grapplers as an attribute and strengthening drill.  To recap take a position on all fours (without knees touching).  Your hands are roughly under your shoulders and your knees under your hips.  Imagine if you will your friendly neighborhood web-slinger clinging to a building but with less action-oriented posing:

To do the drill, lift one hand and replace it with the contralateral foot.  This should rotate your abdomen from facing the floor to facing the ceiling.  Each time you move you will switch the position of one hand with the contralateral foot or vice versa.  Your head should shift 90° in the hortizontal plane and your belly button should rotate 180° in the vertical with each limb switch.

I have recently begun to experiment with variations of the Spider-Man Drill to make it more challenging.  One simple principle is to use an odd number of switches in the same direction, e.g. 1, 3, or 5 clockwise or counter clockwise, and then adding exercises in between.  For example, walk (using all fours) from whatever position you end up in.  Or extend one leg inferiorly dropping first one hip to the floor and recovering, then the other.  Another drill that you can attempt is to add a series of exercises after each series of switches.  Today I placed my fitness ball to my right when I was in the downward Spider-Man as well as making sure that my Wavemaster Bag was in front of me.  Using a three Spider-Man switch I rotated through:

1. Belly up, feet toward fitness ball: Dips with feet on fitness ball x10
2. Belly down, feet toward Wavemaster: Feet elevated push-ups x10
3. Belly up, head toward fitness ball: Place back on ball, alternating marching step x10 e/
4. Belly down, feet away from Wavemaster: Hindu push-ups x10

You've just gone round the world with the Spider-Man drill.  Now let's do a more challenging variation.  Place a Bosu ball, sunny side down.  Again using a three Spider-Man switch and being careful to avoid the Bosu ball, I rotated through:

1. Belly up: V-sits on inverted Bosu ball x10 (hint: slow and don't jerk)
2. Belly down, feet toward Wavemaster: Placing myself in a push-up position with my hands on the Bosu and feet on the bag stand, try marching in place x10 e/
3. Belly up: Place your hands on the Bosu ball and move your rear away from it so that you can perform dips x10
4. Belly down, feet away from Wavemaster: Push-ups on the Bosu ball x10

I would like to explore the possibilities of using either ankle/wrist weights or dumbells to intensify the Spider-Man drill, but that will have to be another work-out.  I have held pad rounds while people did the Spider-Man drill as a conditioning exercise but also to expedite ground-n-pound striking, however my goal here was solo drilling, perhaps I can hit the bag...