Hi
@JennABP ! Welcome to the Hive!
Everyone comes to fitness from a different place. So it's impossible to design a "beginner" program that is absolutely right for every body. This is why modifications are your friend. It is absolutely okay to do them for any exercise in any program at any level. Kudos to you for taking the initiative to look many of them up for yourself!
@thinman has offered you some great options for planks.
I would also suggest taking a look at DAREBEE's
Modifications & Alternatives Guide. It details all the basic modifications, and you can extrapolate from there suitable modifications for similar exercises.
Note that Foundation Light does not include full planks. All the exercises done from a plank position in Foundation Light are done on an incline, which is one of the ways to modify planks to make them easier. If you're still finding the incline plank exercises too hard, try doing them on a steeper incline. The incline (or decline, once you're looking to make exercises more challenging) modification is very versatile in that you can take as much or as little assistance (or added challenge) as you need, depending on the slope you use.
Back & Core is meant to be a more difficult program than Foundation Light. The "suitable for beginners" tag is perhaps not as useful as the program difficulty level, which is Level II for Back & Core but only Level I for Foundation Light. (I think Back & Core is actually mislabeled here. I think it should be Level III due to all of the plank work. But in any case, it is certainly a higher difficulty-level program than Foundation Light.)
re: Programs having easy days and challenging days: This is somewhat done by design. DAREBEE's programs are designed to be done every day to help us build/maintain the workout habit. There are no days off. But your body does need time to recover between hard workouts. So active recovery is built into DAREBEE's programs. Sometimes this is accomplished by focusing on different areas of the body from one day to the next. (For example: one can do strength training every day, and still have adequate recovery between workouts, if one focuses on upper body work one day, core work the next, legs the next, etc.) Sometimes active recovery is built in by having one workout in the rotation (usually one day in four) be much easier than the other workouts.
Individual exercisers will also notice some days in programs being easier than others simply because we all come to the programs with different strengths and weaknesses. If you're finding the plank days in Back & Core impossible to do without modifications, but the other days in the program extremely easy, this is an indication that your fitness level w.r.t. balance & coordination, flexibility, and lower body strength is significantly higher than your fitness level w.r.t. upper body strength. Most of us have these kinds of imbalances, born from the activities of our daily lives. It's perfectly normal. And it can be mitigated through exercise modifications (both to make the too-hard exercises easier, but also to make the too-easy exercises more challenging, where appropriate).
re: Programs where the jump in strength/skill from one cycle to the next is too large: This too is a personal experience which varies based on a whole host of factors. For myself, for example, I find that many of the upper body strength challenges ramp up too quickly, whereas the lower body-focused challenges remain too easy throughout. I could jump right to day 30 of any of the lower body challenges straight off with no difficulty. Whereas some of the upper body-focused challenges I could not get through in a month or even two months.
In my case this is mostly a result of decades of training my lower body a lot harder and more consistently than I train my upper body. I was a competitive runner for years. I have mostly played lower-body-focused sports like soccer and roller derby. I have throughout my life hiked a lot--currently 2+ hours a day, almost every day. I also dance and have a strong lower-body focus in my yoga practice. Whereas my upper body training is... Well, I do do planks. So there's that. But mostly I use my arms for typing and chopping vegetables. I'm doing maybe 2 minutes a day of load-bearing work on my arms versus multiple hours a day of load-bearing work on my legs. It makes a difference!
If you're doing a Challenge that ramps up too quickly, it's perfectly fine to work with it for longer than the standard 30 days. Just make certain that, if you're repeating days, you repeat a full cycle within the Challenge. i.e.: A lot of DAREBEE Challenges do different exercises on odd-numbered days than on even-numbered days. In which case you'd want to repeat both days. If the Challenge has a series of ramp-ups, followed by an easier active recovery day--some challenges alternate easy/hard/easy/hard, but others ramp up for a few days before giving you an easier day--make sure you're still giving yourself the active recovery days on the same schedule you would get them if you were able to complete the challenge straight through in 30 days. Don't just repeat the one day you're failing on over and over. Those recovery days are just as important to your progress as the hard days!
Finally: any time you're stumped on an exercise-related problem, don't be afraid to do exactly what you did today and post it here in the Hive. (The
Help Desk is generally the best place for "how do I...?"-type questions.) The Hive is an important part of the DAREBEE resource! We have a wealth of knowledge and experience here, and people will be happy to help you out.
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