What's up, guys?
Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX.COM.
What am I doing down here on the floor?
Well I'm going to show you today why it is that when some of you are down here doing
your ab exercises that you stand up and you've got back pain.
What the hell is going on?
You're supposed to be doing something that you thought was good for strengthening your
core when all you're doing is really hurting your back even more.
Well, the problem is that our bodies are usually too smart for our own good, meaning that we
are masters of compensation.
If we know that during a regular Crunch we've got to get from point A to point B, we're
going to get there.
We just may not get there the right way because muscles that aren't supposed to be doing the
job will kick in and do the job.
And in this case when you've got weak abdominals, your number 1 enemy is going to be that hip
flexor that is too eager to kick in and try to do the job of those weak abs.
You see, I'll show you here on the skeleton.
As you see, this big muscle right here, this is the solas major.
This is the big muscle.
It's actually almost, it's almost 18 inches in length.
It's a big, thick muscle, and where it goes is it starts from the very front of your leg,
your upper leg, and it attaches through your body
all the way to the back to your spine.
You can see the last thoracic vertebrae all the way down through every single lumbar vertebrae,
this muscle has attachment to that, to each one of those.
Now you can see what happened if that muscle was too tight, or contributing too much or
overactive.
It's going to start pulling on those vertebrae.
So, you have your direct link.
You have your direct cause of back pain, but we've got to figure out a way to get that
muscle to stop acting up when we don't want it to.
And we can do that with a properly executed Crunch here, and it's one we call the Jonda
Crunch.
And you can do it with just a resistance band and somewhere to anchor it, right.
And what you're going to do is, you're going to take your resistance band, anchor it around
something.
Stick one foot through, and one foot through.
What we're going for here is, we want to have something that we can pull our hamstrings
down into to activate both our hamstrings and our gluts to reciprocally inhibit the
hip flexors.
See, what happens is in order to create movement at a joint, our bodies are smart enough, again,
to realize that
we need to shut down the muscle on the opposite side of the joint if we want to allow a motion
in the opposite direction.
So, if we're going to flex our bicep, we have to reciprocally inhibit the triceps to allow
us to move into flexion at the elbow.
Well, the same thing happens here.
If we could activate the muscles on the posterior side of our hips so our hamstrings and our
gluts, we can reciprocally inhibit the muscles on the front side,
the flexors, the hip flexors from doing anything that we don't want them to do.
And we'll do that here with this Crunch.
And we do that by just sticking our feet, anchoring them through this band, pulling
against the resistance of the band, digging our heels into the ground.
If you don't have a band, you can simply dig your heels really hard into the ground and
squeeze your gluts up.
And then, from here we know that any Crunch that we execute is going to rely on only the
strength we have in our abs because we're not allowing the hip flexors to contribute
anymore.
So you really pull down as hard as you possibly can.
You want to breath in deep, and then exhale as you pull yourself up, ok.
Now, what you'll find is you're likely going to cut your range of motion down significantly,
but that's okay because it doesn't matter if you can come all the way up to here
if all you're doing is hooking your feet under a piece of furniture at home and using the
force of your hip flexors to create leverage to allow yourself to come up.
That's not helping at all.
Matter of fact, that's making the situation worse.
I would much rather see you do only the first 20 or 30 degrees of the motion
because really the most important part is getting the shoulder blades off of the ground
creating that flexion to get your shoulder blades off the ground.
You can do that in the first 20 to 30 degrees, and you don't have to come up, and you're
still really working your abdominal muscles.
So, you come down here.
You breath in.
You dig your heels as much as you can hard into the ground, here.
Try to get a 20 to 30 degree bend at your knees.
And you come up as high as you can, and then lower down.
Same thing.
Dig in.
And then lower down.
Again, if you can get that little extra all the way up to the top up here, great.
If you can't no worries.
You're really trying to focus on, like I said, that one thing and that's developing the strength
of the abs, the true strength of the abdominal muscles.
So, there you have it guys.
Hopefully this video will help you if you're dealing with back pain when you're doing your
ab training because it doesn't need to happen, right.
We already know.
You can't allow muscles to do things that they're not supposed to do or kick in when
they're not really wanted.
But you do want muscles that prefer to work together to work together the right way, and
we do that with the ATHLEANX Training System.
I tell you guys step by step, workout by workout, how to train like an athlete, so you allow
those muscles that are synergistic to work together,
and you try to eliminate those muscles that are contributing when we don't want them to.
It's really all about getting your body to work the way we want it to, get the body to
work the way it's meant to.
We do that, again, with the ATHLEANX Training Program.
If you haven't already, guys, head to ATHLEANX.COM right now and get your ATHLEANX Training System.
In the meantime, if you found this video helpful, leave a comment and a thumb's up below.
I've had this comment come in multiple times, that why this video was made.
Whatever else it is that you want to see, leave those comments guys because I will make
a video, I promise.
I'll see you guys back here again soon.