What's up, guys?
Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX.com.
Let me ask you a question.
Take a look at these three guys and you tell me what makes their mid section so impressive.
One by one.
First up, marshal arts legend, Bruce Lee.
Take note because I’m going to show you another picture in a second.
Next guy, famous boxer, Manny Pacquiao.
Again, take a look, remember it.
We’re going to look at another picture of him in a second.
And of course, my childhood fitness icon, Sylvester Stallone here.
Take another look.
Good.
Now, I’m going to show you another picture of each of these guys again.
Let’s go back to Bruce Lee.
What’s happened?
Do you notice what’s not as impressive?
What’s different?
We’re going to go to the next guy, Manny Paquiao.
Once again, take a look.
What do you think?
What do you see?
Then finally, Sylvester Stallone one more time.
The difference – if I put these pictures side by side – in one picture we see the
development of the serratus anterior, a muscle a lot of us overlook.
In the other picture here, we’ve taken it away.
Now, you don’t want to take yours away.
You want to make sure you’re developing yours as good as possible because you can
see when the serratus anterior is developed it starts the tapering effect down, feeding
into the external obliques, which then feeds into the abs.
If you want to have the best-looking midsection, it’s going to rely on this fan-like muscle
that comes in here.
Here, here, here, and it feeds down right out of the lat, down, and in.
And guess what happens?
Guess how we activate that muscle the most.
We activate the muscle the most from punching because the protraction of the arm and getting
that shoulder blade around the body to wrap around.
It’s not just flipping your arm out like this, but getting your arm extended as far
out as possible.
That gives us the ability to activate that muscle.
But you know what?
We can do that and incorporate that into an entire ab workout.
That’s what I want to do for you here today.
I’m going to give you five exercises that will not only take your arm through that protraction
to get the major activation of that muscle, to help develop it, but secondly, incorporate
the abs as well.
So, you’ll have one, complete workout.
Let’s kick off this boxer ab workout with a pretty basic exercise, but we’re going
to do it differently.
This is a plank.
We’re going to activate the serratus anterior and we can do it simply by not just resting
passively on our forearms but raising the bar a bit and pushing through our forearms.
We’re going to try to keep our forearms in contact with the ground to push our body
away.
By doing so, we’re getting that protraction and rounding of the shoulder blades around
our body, which is key to activating the serratus.
We’re not overlooking the impact that this can still have on the abs.
What’s great about this is we get that one-two combo of incorporating serratus activity with
the traditional rectus abdominus that we get from a plank.
Next, we can take one of my favorite ab exercises, which is the ab-wheel rollout.
Dust yours off.
You can still use this thing, I promise you guys.
It’s still good, but what we do is, once again, we focus on how we’re using it.
When we do the rollout a lot of us will sink down into it and let it collapse on us.
No!
If you want to activate the serratus as well, what you’ll need to do is push that wheel
out, actively in front of you.
I get up on top of it.
You can see me initiate by pushing my arms down and lengthening them as far as I can.
Then, holding that position – because that’s the key; being able to hold that position
the entire time – then execute your rollout, and come back in.
Again, there’s no differentiation here.
We’re still working the abs.
There’s nothing we’re taking away from working the abs.
All we’re doing is adding to the fact that we’ve now activated the serratus on top
of that.
Now this couldn’t be a boxer-ab workout without actually throwing a few punches, right?
We know this is one of the best ways to activate this muscle and we can make it more of a core
challenge by varying the position of our body when we do this.
So, I’ve anchored a band behind me, and what I’m focusing on to get the serratus
activated is to push my hand out and even further.
We’re reaching as far out, and away as possible.
So, it’s not just about getting to here, but it’s about getting to there.
So, we can get the shoulder blade wrapping around.
But I mentioned the feet.
What’s going on down there?
Well, we’re trying to narrow our base of support, so our core has to do more work to
stabilize our body.
Especially as we’re moving our arm against the resistance of the band.
So, you can see I’ve staggered my feet and put them in line with each other, and the
back foot, I’m just going up onto a toe.
So, I’m minimizing my entire base of support, and narrowing that at the same time to make
it more of a core challenge.
But as we talked about, the band and the pushing out in, and of itself is going to really hit
the serratus as well.
This next exercise here is one of my favorites, overall.
It’s a variation of something we call our ‘gymnast abs’ exercise.
That is getting into a dip bar station and then not just worrying about doing dips, and
not worrying about doing knee ups, but working on pulling our pelvis up into this posterior
tilt, which we know is going to activate the abs.
But, look what’s going on at the same time with my hands.
I’m not just pulling up.
At the same time, I’m pushing down on my hands, and away as far as I can, really trying
to round those shoulder blades, and get them around my body to activate the serratus.
We call this a screwdriver.
The screwdriver is a great way to incorporate, not just the serratus, and not just the abs,
but also to get the obliques involved as well.
So, in the holy trinity of ab training – I’ve actually made a whole video on that.
If you haven’t seen that yet I’ll link that at the end of the video.
But in the meantime, it falls in perfectly here as yet another option to really hammer
home the serratus.
Finally, we have another popular ab exercise.
The crunch pulldown.
Not only do guys tend to do it incorrectly, but I think, in this case, they’re missing
out on a great opportunity to include the serratus in this move.
It’s by simply changing the position of the rope, in relation to your body when you’re
doing the exercise.
Most of us will take that rope right in front of us and go straight down, and crunch.
Why not turn your body around?
If we have the rope anchored behind us, and we pull that weight stack, and we reach; now
we’re getting the serratus activated against the resistance of the stack.
Then from there, then we execute the crunch pulldown.
We’re getting the serratus activated the entire time, we’re incorporating the abs
again through every, single exercise here, the rectus abdominus is getting a great workout.
We mentioned in the beginning that the serratus feeds into the external oblique, which feeds
right down into the rectus abdominus.
So, these muscles prefer to be engaged together.
We’re going to finally allow them to do that here, for the first time.
So, there you have it, guys.
There is your complete workout.
Do each of these exercises.
Focus mostly on the quality of every repetition.
If you find that you’re losing the ability to contract your serratus, slow it down.
Get a good, quality rep and if you can’t get anymore then that’s the end of that
exercise.
Take a rest and move onto the next.
Try to go through two or three rounds of this, if possible.
Guys, I’m telling you, if you want to look like an athlete you’ve got to train like
an athlete.
You can’t overlook muscles that matter.
The serratus, not only does it look good, and as it helped all those guys that I showed
you in the beginning to have an entirely impressive core.
And even if you’re not a fighter, it’s going to lead to great benefits, in terms
of shoulder stability, and keeping your shoulder moving right.
Especially so you can move it up over your head.
These are all things that matter.
We overlook none of it when it comes to our ATHLEANX training programs.
If you’re looking for a program that tells you how to do all this step by step, head
over to ATHLEANX.com.
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I told you I’d link one of those videos here at the end of this video.
I’m going to do that for you in just a couple seconds.
In the meantime, I’ll be back here again in just a couple days.
Let me know what else you want me to cover and I’ll do my best to do that in the days
and weeks ahead.
See you soon.