Cross crawl exercises increases the heart rate.
Just for fun, I measured my heart rate while doing traditional swings, and compared it to my heart rate while doing the cross crawl exercises. I used clubs that weighed 800 grams each for both sets of exercises. I used an iPad app called Heart Graph for KettleBelling to capture the data. Conditions were as follows:
Set 1
Set 2
Set 1
- Alternating outer mills, 50 seconds, followed by 10 seconds rest
- Double outer mills , 50 seconds, followed by 10 seconds rest
- Alternating inner mills, 50 seconds, followed by 10 seconds rest
- Double inner mills, 50 seconds, followed by 10 seconds rest
- Parallel mills left, 50 seconds, followed by 10 seconds rest
- Parallel mills right, 50 seconds, followed by 10 seconds rest
- Transitions between inner and outer mills, 50 seconds, followed by 2 minutes rest
Set 2
- Exercise 1, 50 seconds, followed by 10 seconds rest
- Exercise 2, 50 seconds, followed by 10 seconds rest
- Exercise 3, 50 seconds, followed by 10 seconds rest
- Exercise 4, 50 seconds, followed by 10 seconds rest
- Exercise 5, 50 seconds, followed by 10 seconds rest
- Exercise 6, 50 seconds, followed by 10 seconds rest
- Exercise 7, 50 seconds, followed by 2 minutes rest
You can see that the combination exercises are very effective at raising the heart rate.