JEFF: What's up, guys?
Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX.com.
Today we're covering the Ab Roller.
As a matter of fact, the five biggest mistakes that people make when they use this thing.
I've gone on record as saying, "I love this".
I actually do.
For $10 you can get one at Wal-Mart and do wonders for your abs if you're doing it right.
You’ve got to cover the five mistakes.
To do that, we're going to do what we always do.
We're going to show the mistakes.
For that, we bring in the biggest mistake at ATHLEANX: Jesse.
Welcome to the video.
JESSE: You want me doing things wrong again?
JEFF: You're going to be doing the things wrong, once again.
JESSE: Okay.
One condition.
I want my new, new, new intro.
JEFF: You've got another 'new' intro?
JESSE: Uh, one word.
Laser beams.
Roll it.
All right, cool.
So, what do you need me to do to this?
JEFF: I'll tell you what you should do with this.
Honestly.
JESSE: That's harsh.
JEFF: Can we cut the intros finally?
JESSE: No.
I can't.
JEFF: All right.
Guys, let's show the mistakes here.
I will tell you one more thing.
If you're someone that's knocking out 100 ab rollouts, you're not doing them right.
I promise you.
You can do them well, and correctly, and do that many.
If you do them well, you're going to see your number coming way down, but the effectiveness
is going to go way up.
Let's hit the first mistake.
So, the first one here is very easy to spot.
More importantly, to fix.
It has to do with the position of our elbows.
You can look at Jesse and me doing them side by side here.
One of them – hint – is doing it wrong.
Jesse.
And one of them is doing it right.
The fact is, you want to have your elbows locked out straight because as soon as you
have even the slightest bit of bend in your elbows, you're transferring the workload away
from the core and toward your triceps.
We don’t want that.
If you're trying to develop your abs by doing this exercise – it's called an 'ab rollout'
– we don’t want to turn it into a tricep rollout.
You have to focus on making sure your elbows aren't even this bent, but completely straight.
A lot of us will start to fatigue as we start to perform the rep and have that breakdown.
Don’t.
If you have to stop or reset for a second, do so.
Make sure the arms are out there.
You'll also benefit your straight-arm scapular strength we've talked about so many times
on this channel by doing that.
Once you get your arms in this locked out position, the leverage will favorably lend
itself to creating more force and stability through the shoulder girdle, which will transfer
right into putting all the work being done where it's supposed to be; by your abs.
Speaking of using your arms, it gets even worse than that.
What happens is, as we get out to the end of the ab rollout, how are you pulling yourself
back in?
I'm going to tell you, if you're someone who's doing the 100 reps I talked about before,
I know how you're doing it.
I already have an idea because I can see you doing it right now.
You're initiating the pull back with your arms, instead of letting your arms stay out
there initiating the pull from your torso.
Look at Jesse and me side by side, once again.
You can see that once we get out of there, now the initiation of the return is where
this all goes wrong.
At least for Jesse, because he starts to pull back in.
He's literally trying to change the physics of the exercise in his favor by pulling that
ab wheel closer to his body, and then trying to initiate the trunk curl.
That's not what you want to do.
Look, if you don’t have the strength to do this properly, just don’t go out as far.
But don’t bastardize the movement by pulling it in halfway and then initiating the trunk
curl.
You can see here, for me, when I get out there the first move is not with the ab wheel.
The first move is with the curl of the trunk.
I'm initiating with the abs and pulling back.
You can feel this, guys.
Just focus on once you come out there, go to a dead stop if you have to.
Once you start to move again, you start from here, not at all moving the wheel back toward
you.
I promise you, you're going to get this right.
As a matter of fact, it's going to feed directly into the third, and probably largest, mistake
people make that I'm going to cover right now.
The third one here is a big one.
As a matter of fact, it's the most popular mistake people make with the ab wheel.
It's the position of the hips when you're doing the exercise.
Guys, you want to setup an imaginary line right at your knees.
When you rollout and come back in you never want to cross it again with your ass.
If your ass crosses that imaginary line, your ass is in trouble because the exercise is
being done improperly.
I covered this in depth in a video before and I just recently reposted it here on Instagram.
This was picked up by Men's Health and talked about in depth in a recent article.
Why?
Because it matters.
It's very, very important.
When you look at Jesse and I doing the exercise side by side you can instantly see that somebody
is doing more work with their abs than the other.
I can give you a hint.
It ain't Jesse.
The point is, once you do what he's doing you're taking all the load off the abs and
you're throwing it right on the hip flexors.
Our hip flexors certainly don’t need the extra work.
What we're doing is, you want to make sure that when the ab wheel gets closer, it gets
closer because you're pulling in with the flexion of the trunk.
Which is one of the functions of the abs.
We don’t want to sit ourselves back by bending through the hips and getting hip flexion.
Which is what he's doing.
Once again, the people who claim to do 100s of reps of this exercise, it's simply because
they're doing this.
They're breaking that imaginary line at their knees, with their asses.
Don’t do that anymore, guys.
Get out of there and come back and keep it up.
Almost like there's a wall right behind you and you can't touch it.
Make sure all the work is being done by your abs by staying in front of that imaginary
line, not touching that wall with your backside.
While we're talking about the hips, let's stick there.
Let's talk about the pelvis itself and what we want to do with it because it's very important.
Whenever you're doing any kind of ab training the position of the pelvis is key.
Are you allowing your pelvis to go into anterior tilt, or are you going into posterior tilt?
We should see, just by the action here, when I go into anterior tilt, I don’t work my
abs.
I'm stretching them out.
When I go into a posterior tilt, I'm trunk curling from the bottom up, as opposed to
the top down, but we're still creating spinal flexion.
So that means my abs are working.
Anytime you do an ab rollout, particularly if you want to protect your low back – because
a lot of people can screw up their low back if they get this wrong.
What you want to do is get into a posterior tilt and maintain that from beginning to end.
You can see Jesse and I doing something quite different here.
Jesse is getting that alternating positioning from the posterior tilt when he's up at the
top.
Then when he reaches out, mostly because he probably lacks proper ab strength in the first
place to support that position when he's fully elongated, he drops down into a pretty severe
anterior tilt.
That shifting back and forth between anterior and posterior tilt is placing a lot of excess
strain and stress on your lumbar spine.
Instead, you can see me doing it here where I'm going to setup that posterior tilt at
the top and as I roll myself out, I'm still maintaining a tight pelvis.
I'm trying to keep that pelvis rotated under.
I'm not allowing myself to drop down into that anterior pelvic tilt.
Neither should you.
Finally, number five.
Why are you always only going straight out?
I know you've probably learned the exercise that way, but have you ever tried it differently?
Because if you did, you'd feel something quite different in your abs, and for the benefit
of your abs.
Remember that our abs, though they do work in the sagittal plane, and though I do tell
you to 'follow the fibers', we've also discussed how heavily used they are when it comes to
controlling and preventing rotation.
So why don’t you challenge yourself with a little bit of rotation?
It's very simple to do with an ab wheel.
Just don’t go straight out.
Go in a little bit of an angle here, go in a little bit of an angle there.
Again, Jesse and I are doing the exercise.
Here, he's doing it correctly.
He's learned from the mistakes we've already corrected in the video, but he's just going
straight out.
As opposed to me, where I'm taking a couple of little turns.
A little bit left, a little bit right, a little bit left, a little bit right.
Every time I head off in one direction, I'm creating a little bit of a rotational challenge
for my core.
That's a great thing, as we've just discussed.
So I'm not telling you to start making these really huge turns – which I've seen people
do, and they've shortened the exercise and made it a lot easier because their travel
or elongation of their core is much shorter than it would be if they went out straight.
I'm saying, continue to go out straight and challenge yourself, but make the turns pretty
gradually.
A little bit left, a little bit right and you'll get far more out of the exercise.
There you have it, guys.
Five things that you want to make sure you'd never do when you're doing your ab rollouts.
Even though I know you're going to do a few less repetitions, I promise the ones you do
are going to be that much more effective.
That's what matters at the end of the day.
As I talk about all the time here, it's not just the exercises you do.
It's how you do them that matters.
If we put the science back in strength, everything we do will have much more of an impact when
we do them.
If you're looking for programs where we put that all together, you can find them over
at ATHLEANX.com.
In the meantime, if you haven't already done so, click 'subscribe' and turn on your notifications
so you never miss a video when we do one.
And you can always let me know what you want me to cover.
I'll do my best to do that for you in the days and weeks ahead.
With that being said, we're going to see you back here in – why are you back here again?
JESSE: How f***ing cool were those laser beams?
JEFF: Guys, you are encouraging the hell out of him.
Look at what you're creating here.
Please.
No more laser beams.
JESSE: What about in the outro?
JEFF: I'm done.
JESSE: Are you sure you don’t want laser beams in the outro?