What's up, guys?
Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX.com.
So, I want to find out today how awake your core is.
What type of mind-muscle control do you have with the elements of your core?
We know by now the core is not just your abs.
There's a lot of muscles in and around your torso that control your core.
Not having the ability to intentionally control them will set you up for disaster if you're
trying to get them to react spontaneously, which is going to happen when you go to lift
weights in the gym, or if you're going to try to compete.
You're going to need to have spontaneous participation of these muscles, and if you can't establish
a good, intentional relationship with them, then they're going to leave you hanging when
you need them the most.
So there's a drill here called the Ring of Fire that was actually created a long time
ago by Vince Gerardo.
Old throwback name, kind of dated myself right there, but the concept plays out and it's
actually really good, easy things we could do.
Here's what you do.
You hang a band to your – over a pull up bar.
We've got one of our ATHLEAN elastic bands.
You wrap it around each wrist, you wrap your hands together, now you're good and locked
in here, okay?
What you're trying to do is get some steady tension on the abs.
but the majority of the work is not going to come from the band, but from you actually
contracting as hard as you possibly can to create this mind-muscle connection.
The first one we're going to do is the easy one.
It's the top down movement.
We have better control here and we're used to doing this.
Gravity actually helps us here.
We're going to try to hit the upper abdominals by crunching down as hard as we possibly can,
bringing our rib cage down over our pelvis.
You really, really want to try to contract as hard as you can, to the point where if
it's working right you might cramp up, or you might feel even a little bit of pain in
the upper abs.
That's good.
You hold it for five to ten seconds and without resting you now try to shift to the lower
abs. to do this, now we're trying to do it with one muscle group, but we're preferentially
hitting different areas by the angle of pull.
So when we try to contract here we're going to posteriorly rotate our pelvis as hard as
we possibly can without letting up on that constant tension of the band.
Again, we try to really, really bear down here and hold this as long as we possibly
can.
Then we move onto the obliques.
We can do our internal obliques and to do our internal obliques, if we're working our
right side, as we are right now, we're going to try to rotate our shoulders in that same
direction.
So if we're working our right side we're rotating toward the right and we're squeezing and contracting
as hard as we possibly can.
Now don't worry.
You may not feel that level of discomfort that I was telling you about, or you might
not feel that cramping.
You might not feel much of anything at this point, and that's because you really, truly
need to work on that.
If you're feeling it that's actually a good sign, that's where you want to get to.
Where you can feel it on every single move.
We then move onto the external obliques.
Again, no resting.
It's the ring of fire for a reason.
You're trying to build up this burn, this constant burn in your entire core.
You're rotating now to the opposite side.
You bear down and contract as hard as you possibly can here.
Now, of course, we can't forget about the all-important muscles as we wrap around to
the side of the back and we've talked about it – I've done a whole video on the quadratus
lumborum and how important this is.
This is the hip hiking muscle.
So what we do now is we try to drop back and rotate back and toward our back hip, or our
kidney area.
We're really trying to contract as hard as we possibly can unilaterally to that right
side.
Before we're all done we wrap around to the back to hit the spinal extenders here.
We work on bending back into extension to hit those paraspinal muscles right alongside
of our spine.
Again, you're only halfway through the ring of fire because you have to work your way
back around to the front and then, of course, you've got to work your way on the left side
and back, and then back to the front again.
So, how we program this, it's actually a drill that you can put anywhere in your workouts.
You can actually do this prior to a lower body workout.
You're actually awakening these muscles, getting them to know that you want something from
them.
So when you spontaneously try to get it from them, they're there to help you out.
Of course we know how important that is to participate and stabilize in your core during
lower body movements, but you can do them prior to a workout, after a workout, three
to four times a week; however much help you need.
If you've already got good neuromuscular control there you don’t need to do it as often.
If you have poor control – meaning you can't feel many of these things when you're trying
to contract them – then you need to start incorporating this more often.
Guys, I hope you've found this video helpful.
Again, it's a very simple, easy to implement thing to do and of course, if you want to
start getting more of these types of advanced training techniques, putting the science back
in strength, knowing when to do them; head over to ATHLEANX.com and find all our ATHLEANX
training systems.
I lay it out for you day by day, step by step, and we even throw in the meals as well, meal
by meal.
That's over at ATHLEANX.com.
In the meantime, if you've found this video helpful leave your comments and thumbs up
below and let me know what you want to see here on this channel and I'll make sure I
do my best to bring those to you.
All right, guys.
I'll be back here again soon.
See you!