What's up, guys?
Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX.com.
You guys will really think that it's bullshit.
This is not my best tip ever, right?
Come on.
Let's do it for real.
Look, you should know me by now.
That shit wouldn't fly as my best tip ever.
For me to give you something and call it "the best tip ever", it's going to meet three criteria.
First and foremost, unlike what I've shown you in the open, it's going to actually work.
Number two: it's going to be something that you can feel right away.
Number three: it's something that all of us can do.
There's no barrier to entry to what I want to show you because I want everybody to be
able to benefit from this.
So let me show you first and foremost how we all could feel what I'm talking about,
all right?
I'm going to explain why it works.
Do me a favor and just sit down.
Maybe you're already sitting down.
What you're going to do is you're just going to sit back and contract your abs, okay?
So here, contract your abs as hard as you can, great.
You should be able to feel the contraction here in your abs as you do that.
Now, one slight difference.
I've covered this before and it's so important that I want to make sure I cover it again.
Cross your legs over, squeeze your knees as hard as you can by pulling your legs together
using your adductors.
Now, contract your abs.
You should feel a distinct difference here in your abs when you have you adductors contracted
and activated.
I could feel it right away.
There's a big difference.
Here's why this works – because I know you're going to want to know "Hey, how the hell did
that happen?"
well, we explain that on this channel.
So if you'll look at the abs and the adductors and how they influence each other, the abs
are going to come from in this region up here, and they're going to attach onto the pelvis
down here, okay?
All the way down here into the wee-regions of the pelvis.
Then your adductors are going to start from down low, and they're going to attach a little
bit further back, but still onto the pelvis.
So you basically have tension from the top down and the bottom up.
Now, I've covered the concept before, that you cannot fire a cannon from a canoe.
If you have an unstable base it's hard to generate a lot of power of force in the other
direction.
What you need is, you need oppositional forces so you can generate some tension; some elastic
tension.
So if we were only pulling from the top up because we're really not concentrating on
generating any tension from below it would literally pull my hands.
If I pulled up here it would literally be pulling my other hand around for the ride.
Almost like a dog on a leash.
I pull, it goes for the ride.
I pull, it goes for the ride and you can see that the amount of tension that the abs, in
this case, can generate is not all that much.
But if I were to activate, contract, the adductors from below, now the pelvis is getting pulled
in this direction, too.
So I've got tension down here, and tension up here.
Now, look what happens when I try to engage the abs, or contract them from up top.
The strength of the contraction – the tension that's generated here – is significantly
higher, but at the same time I've actually gotten, now, a more impressive contraction
of force that's being generated through my entire core.
That's why you can feel the immediately difference as you develop some oppositional tension here
from the adductors.
Okay, so we know we can do that.
Where does the towel come in?
As I said, we only use towels for real uses here.
So what you do is, you take a towel.
I don’t care if it's a roll of paper towels.
It's going to took funny in the gym if you do that, but if you have a gym towel, all
you do is just wrap the towel up and we put the towel between your knees and you squeeze.
We know we're squeezing because if we don’t it just drops.
Squeeze as we're doing our exercises.
So you can see as I get up here on the bar and do this, you can see how this towel is
now guaranteeing activation of the adductors while I do my leg raise.
I could take this down to the floor in a 90-90 crunch.
The same thing.
The funny thing is, as you watch me do this here, if you don’t use a towel, watch what
your knees tend ‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬to do on their own.
They tend to drift further, and further apart because it's comfortable to drift further
and further apart.
Next I could do it on a bench in a seated knee tuck.
The same thing with the towel between my knees and perform the exercise that way.
Again, we've taken the anatomy, we've put it all together with one simple tip that takes
no time at all to implement – just a little bit of consciousness on your part – and
you get much better ab workouts because of it.
You use that and accumulate better and better reps over time and you're going to get much
better abs because you're going to get better quality in the same amount of time.
All right, guys.
If you're looking for more science behind the strength – it's what we do here and
we don’t give you the bullshit, we skip right to the stuff that actually works – head
to ATHLEANX.com and get our ATHLEANX training system.
In the meantime, if you've found this helpful make sure you share it with someone else that
you think will find it helpful as well and leave a comment below and tell me what you
want to see here on this channel so I could do my best to cover it in the days and weeks
ahead.
All right, guys.
I'll see you soon.