What's up, guys?
Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX.COM.
Let me ask you a question.
How strong are your abs?
And I mean, really, how strong are your abs?
Not measured by the fact that you can make it through a hard ab workout or that you can
maybe do an ab exercise that a lot of other people can't
because that's not truly determining whether your abs are strong.
It might be that you have strong hip flexors and that your abs are actually being dominated
by that and are still weak.
So, I wanted to show you a quick test that you can do today without anything, no equipment,
right here on the floor that you can do right now and see where you're at.
It's really simple.
You have to lay on the ground.
You're going to do a double leg lowering test.
You're going to lay on your back here, and establish a flat back.
By doing the flat back position and keeping and maintaining it, you're activating your
abs, right.
To do a posterior tilt, we have to activate and engage our abs.
Well, a stronger, more dominant hip flexors will try to pull us into anterior rotation,
and especially, we can hold our hip flexors static here by holding our legs out,
and that might mean we have strong hip flexors, but if we're able to still hold a posterior
tilt to counteract the weight of our legs, well then we know we also have strong abs
too.
So that's what this test is going to measure.
You flatten your back, you take your thumbs like this and you try to point them into your
back.
You try to connect them underneath your back.
The only way they'll be able to connect is if you go into an anterior tilt.
So, if I demonstrate right here, I go to anterior tilt.
There's space.
I could actually get this whole hand over to the side.
So we don't want any space at all.
We want to have a completely flat back to make sure those abs are engaged the whole
time.
So, you point your fingers into your sides in your low back.
You raise your legs up at 90 degrees.
From here, you want to see as you progressively lower your legs down,
can you withstand the weight, the increasing weight of your legs against gravity by maintaining
that posterior pelvic tilt because of the strength of your abs?
So, I'm up here at 90 degrees.
Most people should be able to do this really easy.
I lower down slowly to about 75 degrees.
If you find that you cave here, you get that anterior tilt, or that drop of the pelvis,
you might have some problems.
That would be a pretty weak set of abs if you already lose it at 75 degrees.
You then move down to 45 degrees.
This is about a basic score if you can keep and maintain your posture to this point, but
at this point you fall, then you fail, well, that's a decent score, k.
Then we come down even lower, down to about 30 degrees.
It's a better score.
It's not perfect, k.
It gets harder to talk too.
Then from here we go down just above the floor.
Now we've got the weight of our legs against the full force of gravity pretty much.
And again, I have yet to be able to break that pelvic posterior tilt into interior tilt
so I'm still doing good, but here's the true test.
From here, after you've held it for about 5 seconds, can you reverse the direction?
So now I go back up to 30 without allowing my pelvis to break into an anterior tilt.
And from here can I go up to 45?
And then from here back up to about 70.
It should get easier now.
And then back up to 90.
It's where along that chain you find that you break that determines the strength of
your abs.
Here's the cool thing about this test.
If you break in those high positions without having gone down very low, that could become
your exercise.
That could become your strengthening.
Stick within that range.
Get right to the range where you break and back off.
Get right to the range where you break, and back off and perform it in reps.
If you can get all the way down and all the way back up, you can see you can make this
much harder because of the whole time under tension principle
that you can actually do these much lower and slower.
So, yeah, you might be doing leg lifts to train your abs.
Well start doing them under this cadence,
2 seconds down, 2 seconds down, 2 seconds down, controlling it every single step of
the way, and you can turn that into a 10 rep killer just by doing that one set.
So, there you go guys.
There's a quick way to test your abs and you know, a follow up way to train them based
off of the results of that test if you find that you still need some work.
Guys, we have a complete set of ab workouts in ATHLEANX.
As a matter of fact, in our ATHLEANX Training System, we vary the ab workouts every single
day and have unlimited ab workouts because of the shuffle feature built in.
If you haven't already, head to ATHLEANX.COM.
Get our 90-Day Training Program.
We train your whole body, entire body.
We obviously get the abs to show by giving you the nutrition plan, but we also train
them like an athlete each and every day with all new workouts every single time.
Guys, I'll see you over at ATHLEANX.COM.
In the meantime, if you found this video helpful, make sure you leave a thumb's up and some
comments below.
Whatever else it is that you want to see, we'll cover it in the weeks ahead.
See ya.