What's up, guys?
Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX.com.
A couple weeks back I showed you how, by contracting your adductors – your groin muscles – doing
hanging ab exercises, that you could get a lot more work done for your abs and therefore
get better results from your hanging ab exercises because of the stability that the contraction
provides and how it actually sets up a stable base for your abs to contract.
When it comes to stability ab exercises though – like the plank and the ab rollout, two
of the more popular and beneficial exercise for your abs – the same thing applies here,
too.
But you've got to learn how to shut off the other muscle.
This time it's the hip flexors.
Again, we've talked about how the hip flexors can get too involved in ab exercises costing
you for your abs to actually do the work.
So, I'm going to show you two exercises right here and show you how to shut them off to
better activate the abs.
First of all, I'm going to get into a plank position here.
When we normally do planks we don’t even really focus so much on what the hell is going
on from here down.
We always focus on the abs.
we don't really focus on what's going on down below.
So you see people do planks in this position all the time, or maybe they'll even be like
this, right?
As it gets harder they'll even start doing this a little more.
They'll raise up a little bit.
Now, while that is ab activation by lifting up, what you're really doing is, if you're
digging your toes into the ground you're using your hip flexors to counterbalance, or counterforce
your ability to stay in this plank.
I talked about it in our shoulder video last night, how when you try to push back into
a bench – if you do a shoulder press – you're just pushing a counterforce away from you
so you can get that weight away.
The same things happens here.
You've got your toes digging into the ground, hip flexors are activated and are pushing
into the ground.
Therefore, we know if the hip flexors are activated that the gluts are not, and the
abs are not doing as much work as they could because the hip flexors are trying to help
with that.
So what we can do is squeeze our ass cheeks together here.
It makes it a lot easier now.
Not only do we have a stable base from below, but we're shutting down the hip flexors.
We're inhibiting the hip flexors from activating by squeezing our ass together.
You can have your toes, your heels right next to each other and squeeze your legs together
to also activate the adductors like we talked about the last time.
Now you'll find that the abs do much more of the work.
It doesn’t end there, though.
Now I want to show you the ab rollout.
Like I said, next up is the ab roller.
The ab roller is a popular ab exercise, and for good reason.
As a matter of fact I think it's one of the better ab exercise you can do.
It's definitely challenging.
We have a whole workout on this channel if you're looking for one that you could use
this with.
More importantly it's how we do it.
It's the lack of focus on some of the muscles that you may have forgotten about that's going
to make this much more effective for your abs.
This is what we do, normally, when we do an ab rollout.
Watch as I go out here.
We'll go out, people will get to the end here and the first movement they'll do is this.
What is happening is the hips are flexing.
This angle, you can even see it on my pants with the three stripes.
The angle of the hips is flexing, okay?
So if you really want this to work, even if you don’t hold it all the way out, the most
important time to hold this is when you get out there.
So if you do the ab rollout and you get to the end, now squeeze your gluts there so the
first move is back with the abs, okay?
Here and here.
Okay?
Everything's moving up.
I'm not flexing, my butt's not going back, and everything is coming up at once.
When you get to the top you can do some of that flexing to actually incorporate the abs
much more strongly.
The idea is that you want to make sure that you're doing this right.
It doesn’t matter how many you can do.
I don’t care if you can do 100 ab rollouts.
I see people do it all the time, just counting away at ab reps.
It doesn't matter how many, or how high you can count to.
It only matters how many quality reps you can do and that's what you're after here,
okay.
Make sure you start incorporating, becoming more aware of some of the muscles that aren't
right here, but are around here supporting the efforts of the abs and helping you to
get more out of it.
Guys, we have complete ab workouts everyday available for you with our ATHLEANX training
system.
I do believe that daily algorithm is a great thing, but only if you do it efficiently,
short periods of time, more effective reps.
I put that together for you with our ATHLEANX training system.
You can get that over at ATHLEANX.com. in the meantime, if you've found this video helpful
make sure you leave your comments and your thumbs up below and let me know what you want
to see on this channel and I'll do my best to bring it to you.
All right, guys.
I'll see you back here soon.