Transcription
In a sea of exercises, you might think it would be pretty damn near impossible to pick just two to focus your efforts on. However, if you apply the science to your selection, it becomes a whole lot easier. Speaking of science, Jesse, give me two muscle markers. Step with me over to the board because your job of getting a four-pack, six-pack, eight-pack, or even ten-pack becomes infinitely easier if you know the right type of ab exercises to do. Speaking of that, if you're not sure what type of pack you actually have inside, make sure you check out this video because I break it all down for you step by step.
Now, the only shame of you not watching that video would be if you were actually unable to see my artwork. Yes, it's backwards. Oh right, well, same point, right? Because whether or not it's a piece of paper or excess body fat, if you can't see the results of your hard work, no matter how many ab exercises you're doing, then you're not doing it right. So, what we have to do is make sure that our nutrition is in check and that you're working on dropping your body fat level so you can actually see the results of what I'm about to show you.
If we take out the muscle markers, we can see that there are two main things you need to focus on, and it's not necessarily the exercises as much as it is going to be the movements. The first is the guy laying on his back like this who wants to move the bottom portion here towards his head while keeping his head and torso fixed in place. Then you've got the guy who's laying like this on his back who now wants to move this portion towards his feet but keep the legs fixed in place.
Well, the cool part about these two movements is they're actually complementary to each other. The exercise where you move your lower legs towards your upper torso will influence more heavily the lower abdominal region, while the exercise where you move the torso and head towards the feet will preferentially influence more of the upper abdominal region. But we're still not where we need to be because these movements are incomplete; we have more muscles in our midsection that make the whole thing look a hell of a lot better. We're talking about the obliques that run at this angle from both sides. You can see, even when I just draw them here on the board, they visually create a tapering effect.
Well, the only difference between doing a bottom-up movement or a top-down movement in isolation is to simply add rotation. But what exactly are the two exercises? Well, it depends on what level of ability you're at right now. So, let's say we're going to focus on the bottom-up rotation first. If you're a beginner, my recommendation would be something as simple as a corkscrew. All I'm trying to do here is clear my pelvis off the ground. Think about your tailbone; if you can lift your tailbone off the ground by pulling your entire pelvis with your legs connected to it up towards your head and give a little twist at the top, you're going to effectively hit that lower abdominal region.
Now, with that little twist, we're actually, as I said before, incorporating the obliques as well. The cool thing here is that because the knees are bent, the weight of what you're lifting is actually quite easy, making it a perfect option for people who are at more of the beginner level. Now, if you're a little bit more advanced, all you have to do is not necessarily change the exercise but change the amount of weight that you're lifting. It's really easy to do because, in this case, the weight we're lifting is our legs. So, if we can straighten our knees a little bit more and do this as a straight leg variation, you're getting the same effect—lifting more weight through space through a greater arc, which is going to put a little bit more work towards the lower abs while also getting that twist towards the top to incorporate, once again, the obliques.
At the advanced level, we have to change the environment in which we perform the exercise. The best way to do that is to simply hop up on a bar because now we've changed the strength curve of the exercises as well. When we're laying on the ground, when we get the legs up to the top, the exercise becomes a little bit easier because gravity is acting down through the legs. But when we're up on a bar, gravity is acting down against the legs, making that weight feel even heavier.
This brings us back to that second movement, the top-down movement, which should ideally be performed after the bottom-up because of the weight of the legs. This is going to be the more challenging exercise than this, so when you're fatigued, this exercise comes in perfectly. The exercise of choice for beginners here is something called the upper circle crunch. This time, the focus should be not on the pelvis but on the shoulder blades. If you can make sure that you're getting your shoulder blades cleared off of the ground without yanking on your neck to do it, you're going to be doing this exercise right.
But we need that rotation in there too, and that's where the upper circle crunch comes in. So, we're going to try to work ourselves up and then around into a circle, landing on one shoulder blade, rolling back to two, rotating to the other shoulder blade, lifting myself off, and continuing to work my way around in that circle. Of course, you want to divide the time that we're doing the exercise between rotating clockwise and also rotating counterclockwise.
The advanced would do something different; we call this the power over. Once again, it's a top-down movement with rotation. So, I'm lifting not only my shoulder blades but trying to get almost my entire torso up off the ground while keeping my lower body in place, except for one little modification. As I reach across my body to create some rotation, I lift the opposite leg just a little bit, mostly to clear the rotation—in other words, to allow the rotation to happen a little bit more easily. But again, another great top-down movement where you alternate both sides for the duration of however long you're doing the exercise, most of the time 45 to 60 seconds.
For the advanced viewers, we have a crunch pull-down variation, and what I like about this is it can become very advanced because you can continue to put the weight up the stack as heavy as you can handle. But what you have to do is make sure you do it right because so many people screw this up. They take it and make it so damn easy that it gives you no real effect. If you want to do this right, you have to initiate every single repetition right from this upper row of the abdominals. In other words, try to fold your chest onto that top row of the abdominals. Try to create a crease right under your chest line. If you can visualize that, then you can do this right.
What people often do is either sit back onto their heels, literally moving their butt back towards their heels, which is a giant mistake because you're just letting your hip flexors do the activity, or they'll try to hold down by pulling too hard on the arms. I want you to envision having the arms hooked right next to your ears and not moving at any point, only initiating the rep from that movement of the chest, the lower chest line, right towards that top row of the abs. See if you can make them touch; it's a biological impossibility, but it's still a good visualization to have. If you can perform this exercise correctly, guys, you could load it up, like I said, as heavy as you want and make a great advanced version of a top-down exercise.
If you do these two movement patterns, you have a lot of options when it comes to top-down and bottom-up rotation. If you're looking for more ab exercise variations of what those could look like, make sure you head to athletes.com and pick up our Athlex training system. I include the Athlex Ab Shuffle program that gives you endless combinations of how to get the job done. If you're also looking for some help on the meal plans, guys, so you can show the results of your hard work, I've got you covered there too.
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