What's up, guys?
Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX.com.
Today I'm going to show you an invaluable skill, if you want to get the best abs that
you could possibly have.
You've got to know how to contract them.
It's no different than any other muscle in your body.
We've talked about that mind-muscle connection.
The abs, we tend to have amnesia on.
We do not have a good connection with them and don’t know how to do it.
as a matter of fact, if I were to tell you to contract your abs what you might be able
to do is kind of crunch from the top down here to get these top two, or so, to really
pop out, or feel like they're tightening up.
But that's actually not where the focus should be.
The focus should be from the bottom up because with a more stable pelvis you're going to
get much better at developing strong contractions in your abdominal muscles because you've created
that stability from below.
So here's the two things you need to do, and I'm going to show you exactly how to do it.
Really simple, okay?
The first thing is the transverse abdominus.
That's the first muscle you want to be able to contract to get a stronger contraction
in the abs, believe it or not.
Because, like I said, that muscle is going to stabilize the pelvis and create a more
stable surface for the other muscles that are attached to it to contract from.
No different than trying to contract your quads to jump, and doing it off of sand, versus
doing it off of firm ground.
The firm ground is going to allow you to have a better force generation off it, versus the
sand that's kind of giving and wobbling.
We need to be able to prevent our pelvis from wobbling by contracting.
So the transverse abdominus.
You turn to the side here.
Imagine you're walking into the ocean and you hear "Holy crap!
That is cold!
Cold!
Cold!"
You feel that, you tighten here.
The transverse abdominus is the muscle that's tightening.
What you want to do is feel like you can create that scenario.
Relax, and then it's cold.
Now go slow.
It should take you about five seconds to get there.
If you try to do it too quickly you're going to wind up doing this.
You're going to wind up just pulling your stomach in, which is not what you want to
do.
You want to get in this position here.
Relaxed, and then slow, slow, slow.
As I blow out, slow, down.
Now, I can feel that I've got the muscle contracted because I feel this flattening right here
on the inside of my pelvis, on the inside of the hip bones.
I can feel that it flattened out and got firmer and flatter across here.
Now if I were to go do that and then tighten my abs – which is what I'm asking you to
do now – you're going to feel a big difference in your ability to generate an ab contraction.
Here's the cooler one.
If you want to attack it from a different angle, an even easier way to do it.
Work on stabilizing the pelvis from below.
So now take your feet, cross one over the other, and now with your feet right next to
each other what you want to do is squeeze your knees together.
So when we squeeze our knees together we're getting adductors to stabilize the pelvis
from down below because they're attached to the pelvis from underneath.
So now with the adductors squeezed as hard as you can, now tighten your abs.
now feel what a difference it makes here, in your ability to contract your abs.
If you really want to get fancy you do the two of them together.
You cross your knees, you squeeze them together, you try to contract the transverse abdominus
together, and then you contract your abs, a little bit of a slight flex forward.
What is the importance of this?
The importance is, like I said, if you want to get better at having any muscle develop
you'd better have a good mind-muscle connection in that muscle.
And in the abs it tends to be very, very absent.
That's a good one.
Absent.
It's absent.
People don’t have a good contraction, or ability to contract the abs.
but we can change that today.
The way you can incorporate this?
Use it as either an activation drill that you do prior to your ab training.
Use it in the ab exercises itself.
We can squeeze those legs of our together during a hanging leg raise.
We can squeeze them together during heels to the heavens.
We can squeeze them together during a lot of the crunching activities that we do on
the ground.
So it's going to give you the opportunity to work them right into your ab work, or you
even have the opportunity to do them right now, just as you're watching the video.
Try to get better at it as a skill that you just randomly do throughout the day.
In the end it's all going to help you toward getting better development of your abs. of
course, you've got to show them, guys.
If you don’t have that body fat level down enough, they'll never see the results of your
hard work here.
So it's a one-two combination.
If you're looking for a program that kind of puts it all together in one place, that's
what ATHLEANX is all about, guys.
I walk you through the whole nutrition aspect of it to make sure that you have abs.
Not just for two months.
That's bullshit.
I want you to have abs for 365 days a year.
That's what I preach here.
That's why I get on camera here and wear these stupid microphone configurations so you can
see that I'm walking the walk.
All right, guys.
That's over at ATHLEANX.com.
In the meantime, if you've found the video helpful leave your comments and thumbs up
below.
Let me know what else you want me to cover here and I'll do my best to do that in the
days and weeks ahead.
All right, see you soon.