What's up, guys?
Jeff Cavaliere, AthleanX.com.
Having tight abs is probably high up on your list of priorities if you're here watching
Washboard Wednesdays.
But having tight abdominal muscles?
That is an entirely different story.
As a matter of fact, that can create a lot of dysfunction in your other lifts and workouts.
You see, the muscles in your core, particularly the internal and external obliques, and your
rectus abdominus – the six pack muscle – is actually causing a problem for a lot of your
other lifts if they're allowed to become short and tight.
They become short and tight pretty easily because of two things.
Number one: we hardly ever stretch our abs.
I'm going to try to correct that for you here today, by showing you three ways you can.
Secondly: we sit a lot.
Either we're driving in a car on our commute to work, or while we're at work we're sitting.
Even at night, we're sitting a lot.
That allows these muscles to become a little bit tight.
We have to realize when we look at these muscles they're doing the same thing.
They all have attachments, origins and attachments in our rib cage and then down here in our
pelvis.
They take those two points when they're allowed to get tight, and they bring them closer together.
What happens when you bring your ribcage closer to your pelvis?
You look like that.
A lot of postural issues can come out of that.
Actually, that can lead to other things that we think might be problems that aren't.
We see people and we say "Oh, they have low lack of thoracic extension.
They can't extend their thoracic spine."
No, maybe they can't extend their thoracic spine because they can't extend the ribcage
away from their pelvis because they have tight abs.
Here's what we have to do to start addressing this: I take out a physio ball, like I'm showing
you here, and I lay over the top of it.
A lot of you might do this instinctively because you figure it feels good, or it stretches
you out a little bit.
The big thing you have to make sure you're doing here is separating the ribcage from
the pelvis.
I do that by getting into a position where I first lay over the back of the ball, I get
that ribcage expanded, I get my arms up over my head, and then the key is dropping the
hips.
Dropping the pelvis father away from the ribcage so we can get that maximum stretch on the
rectus abdominus.
I can intensify that by just adding a nice deep breath in.
I'm not sure if you can see it or not while I'm doing it, but a nice deep breath in to
expand the ribcage even more, and increase that stretch being felt on the rectus.
Now what I do is, again, you've got to deal with the internal and external obliques, too.
Those are big muscle groups that are impacting our posture in different ways.
These are a little bit slanted compared to the up and down orientation of the rectus
abdominus.
We can get at them, too.
We can get at them by just turning ourselves over and getting on the side of the ball.
Now we get on the side of the ball and the same thing happens here.
Ribcage and pelvis: separate them.
Drop them as far away from each other as you possibly can.
Now when you're leaving up over the ball, if you twist a little bit and lean back you
can get the external obliques to be a little bit favorably stretched because you're taking
them further away from the angle that hey run into the ribcage.
You're pulling that ribcage further away from the pelvis where the external obliques attach.
The same thing can happen here when we go to the internal obliques.
You just want to roll yourself down a little bit, still maintain that side bend, because
the real attachment here is the iliac crest, right on the side of our hips.
Get that a little further away and, again, rotate downward and get away from, or elongate,
the internal oblique a little bit more.
You don’t have to do this all that often because I bet you're not doing it all at the
moment.
Do a little bit more and I promise, you're going to see the benefits as it overlaps into
the rest of your training.
I mentioned in the beginning there's some dysfunction that you could see.
Some of your lifts – by allowing yourself to get tight abs – the squat is probably
the best example of this.
If you try to squat out of the posterior tilt you're immediately putting your low back in
jeopardy of injury because you're in a very compromised position.
That's not a very stable position at all.
You want an anterior tilt out of here so as you lean forward to create the right angle
of the bar through the middle of your feet, you're going to need to have a low back that's
slightly arched to support your spine and keep it in a strong position.
You're only going to get that if you have an anterior tilt, or the ability to anterior
tilt and drop that pelvis down and away from your ribcage.
That's something – like we just covered – is not possible if you allow your abs
to get that tight.
You want to make sure that you're not ignoring your abs when it comes to stretching because
stretching is important for all your muscles.
Your abs are no less important, especially as we realize the implications it has for
not doing them.
I hope you've found this as an eye opener and you'll start to do some of the quick stretches
that I've shown you.
I know sometimes we get a little bit on the nerdy side – the PT side – to explain
these things, but I think, based on the feedback I get from you, these are the things that
help you to understand why it is you're doing what you're doing.
I think if you understand what you're doing you're getting a much better result from doing
them.
That's the whole basis of our Athlean-X training programs.
It's to allow you guys to understand what it is you're doing so you get so much better
results from them.
From all your workouts, all your training, everything you do in and outside the gym.
If you're looking for those training programs, guys, they're over at AthleanX.com.
In the meantime, if you've found this helpful make sure you leave your comments and thumbs
up below.
Washboard Wednesdays, once a week we deal with the core here and I want to make sure
I'm bringing the videos that you guys want to see.
All right.
I'll see you soon.