What's up, guys?
Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX.COM.
I get the question all the time of, 'Jeff, am I doing the right ab workout?'
And then they'll attach the different exercises that they're doing and say, 'Is this good?'
or 'What do you think?'
I can't really answer the question unless I know what your goals are.
And here at ATHLEANX, you guys know, we train professional athletes and we help guys that
want to look like professional athletes.
They want to get a ripped 6 Pack.
They want to build athletic muscle.
Well, if that is your end goal, regardless of whether you plan on having a career at
it, or not, you've got to train like an athlete.
And we say that all the time.
And for ab training, guys, that incorporates a lot of different types of exercises and
functions of the abs.
So today what I wanted to do is show you all the different functions of the abs and start
to illustrate a lot of the different ways that you could be spending your time
if you're truly trying to train like an athlete depending upon what's important to you.
So, if you want to know what those main functions of the abs are,
you have strength goals for your abs, you want to make them stronger.
You have endurance.
You've got to have ab endurance too.
There's times when you're going to need it.
You have the ability to accelerate, generate lots of force through your abs.
Anti-rotational control and stability.
A very, very key component of ab training.
And finally you have to make sure that you have reactive strength, and for a lot of my
MMA athletes and fighters, reactive strength is where it's at.
But, I find that most guys train for one or at max, two.
See, at ATHLEANX, again, we cover them all through all of our programs and all the different
types.
So I want to take you through each one of these things just to give you an idea of what
it is that we're talking about.
So first up is STRENGTH, and with strength you're generally looking at weighted ab exercises.
And a lot of guys will avoid weighted ab exercises thinking that doing them will bulk up their
abs.
That's just not really the case, guys.
There's not really a lot of hypertrophy capacity in your abdominal muscles.
And on top of that, building your abs out a little bit, if you maintain a low body fat,
will actually help you to get the appearance of deeper grooves because you're actually
allowing the muscles to build themselves out a little bit away from the surface.
So, it's not a bad thing.
And here you see me showing you two of the exercises.
The first up is called an Otis Up.
With the Otis Up, it's sort of like the beginning of a Turkish Get Up where you have a dumbbell
in your hand.
Here I've got a 30 pounder.
You're trying to basically initiate from a zero momentum state, the ability to contract
your abs and get our body off the ground up to a seated position.
The arm will rise up as you go up so that it stays in line with your body and up against
gravity.
Obviously you wouldn't want to put it out in front of you where you're starting to test
your shoulder strength more than your ab strength.
Then we transition over to one of the ones I've been using a lot lately which is our
Gymnast Abs exercise.
And here you just anchor a dumbbell in between your feet.
Get up onto a Dip Bar.
You're basically doing nothing with your arms at all other than stabilizing.
And here, you're utilizing sort of the ability to crunch from the bottom up and pull up your
torso, pull up your pelvis into a posterior tilt.
That will engage the lower abs.
Generally the reps in here are in the 10 to 12 rep range if you're trying to go for hypertrophy
or maybe even a little bit heavier if you're going for strength.
Next up we've got our RESILIENCE or anti-rotational capacity of our abs.
And it's really, really important, especially for athletes because, we've talked about again
here before,
the most important thing you can prevent when you're lifting, even on your classic strength
lifts, is energy leak through your core.
Because most everything we do starts, if it's a lower body exercise, the power is generated
from the ground up.
If it's an upper body exercise, a lot of times the power is generated out here in our fingertips
and it transfers all the way through to a stable base on the ground.
So we have to make sure that there's no energy loss through the core and being able to resist
that and have anti-rotational stability through your core is key.
You can see a few great ways to do that right here.
And the first one is with our Bar Walks. and this is a really cool exercise.
You're basically allowing the bar to rest up against our pelvis, and we know that when
we walk, we get rotation of the pelvis.
We'll get this shifting right to left, right to left, as we step forward.
Well, the same thing happens here with the bar.
It's actually mimicking that movement.
What we want to try to do is limit the amount of motion that occurs with the bar.
It wants to swing.
You get the momentum going in one direction because of the weight of the bar, try not
to allow it to move so much.
Contract your abs and prevent excessive motion in one direction or the other.
You want to make it harder?
Do what I'm showing you here.
Hold the bar up overhead.
That makes it even a lot tougher.
Now we've increased the distance that our bar is away from our abs.
We make that a lot tougher for our abs to control, but of course if you've got the strength,
go for it.
Try the harder version.
And then, an exercise that sort of illustrates one of the key things I think guys often do
wrong with a Med Ball Throw, right, if you're throwing them into the wall.
A lot of times guys will allow themselves to recoil all the way back in the direction
that they started, but if you want to start developing your resilience of your abs,
try to throw it against the wall with as much explosion as you can and then control or prevent
the back rotation that happens when you catch the ball.
So, you can see me really struggling to try not to allow the ball to continue in the direction
that I've generated, or that rebound momentum off the bounce.
Of course, having the ability to generate accelerative force from a nonmoving state
is not only important for our athletes, obviously.
Hitters in baseball, even pitchers, quarterbacks in football, anybody that has to generate
a lot of force from a pretty stationary position obviously fighters as well,
but also for the guys that are just looking to get better abs because again, if we're
talking about complete ab development that you're after,
you've got to make sure you're addressing all these things.
Well, the cool thing about the Ab Throw and the Med Ball Throw is that it actually works
that way as well.
You're starting from a zero momentum state and you're really trying to generate as much
force as you possibly can.
So there it works sort of a same exercise/dual purpose.
On the ENDURANCE side of things, we know how important it is for our abs to be able to
be on call whenever needed.
And in order to do that and realize the fact that our abs are on call pretty much all day,
whenever we're standing, whenever we're doing anything functional,
you have to realize that endurance is a key component.
And here we attack it with just a couple exercise examples.
This is an Eccentric Leg Raise where we actually control the descent of the legs on the way
down.
Yeah, you get them up to the top of course making sure to posteriorly rotate the pelvis.
Not just lift from the legs, but also to really concentrate on the lowering on the way down.
And then we can go over to a wall and do something we call a Wall Plant Plank.
By planting our feet into the wall, it's really a good way to get a nice closed chain position
for our Plank, so not just relying on the tips of our toes, but the ball of our feet.
And our feet flat up against the wall.
But here we try to hold and maintain this more difficult version of the Plank and just
see how long we can do it.
And finally, one of the biggest components of athleticism is our ability to absorb force
through our abs and also recover because
even speed and foot quickness is dependent upon the ability of your abs to be REACTIVE.
So, if I get knocked in one direction, if I have lack of strength through my abs,
and I kind of have to really take a long time to absorb that hit that I took before I can
regain control of my body and then move in the other direction,
I'm going to be obviously slower than someone who real good reactive core strength where
I can take that hit quickly contract and get myself back in the other direction.
I've gained a step on that person right off the bat.
Well, we have a lot of ways that we can train reactive ab strength as well.
And again, it's not just for athletes.
This is for guys that want to have complete ab development.
And we work all these things into all of our training programs because I feel it's very,
very important to do that.
A couple examples here are our Pounding Planks.
You can see, in a Pounding Plank, I'm absorbing all that force into the Med Ball with every
single hit of my hand on top of the ball.
And then we move over to the ball here and that's where we start to test our ability
to recover from these different, various movements,
and we can do it by spelling out the alphabet with our arms.
Just position yourself with your forearms on top of the Physioball.
And now I'm going through A, and B, and all those little motions to make the C, and the
D, and the E especially.
And there now we've got to be able to quickly regain control, if we're losing it, regain
control through our core to make sure that we can do nothing but spell letters and not
fall flat on our face.
And then of course we can follow that up with our Ping Pong Slams, and this is just a great
way to absorb force.
This is great for fighters.
You can take the brunt of that force as I slam the ball into the wall either right or
left, it doesn't really matter, and quickly be able to reverse direction and get it back
to the other side.
Sometimes guys will slam this ball into the wall and they'll knock themselves forward.
They'll have to reposition their feet because they can't even absorb the force through their
abs alone.
They need to get help from down below.
So, as you can see guys, there's never a real simple answer to the question of, 'Jeff, am
I doing the right ab workout?'
And then simply listing a few exercises for me because
there's so many components that go into developing abs, and when I'm saying developing abs I
mean complete abs.
And as we do here, and as I say all the time, we train like athletes.
There's a lot of components to developing athletic abs, but I will tell you this, if
you can do it,
you'll have not only great looking abs, you'll have the 6 Pack you're looking for, but you'll
also be functionally strong and be able to do anything that's thrown at you no matter
what that is.
Guys, I can prepare you to train like an athlete even if you don't want to step onto the field
of competition, if you simply want to look like one,
head to ATHLEANX.COM, and start training like one.
Guys, if you found this video helpful, make sure you leave your comments and thumb's up
below.
And let me know what you want to see.
We'll be making more videos for you each and every week.
You know that.
Whatever you guys request, it somehow makes its way into these videos, I promise.
Alright, I'll see you guys back here soon.