Burn Your Abs In hell

Posted on 22 October 2015 at 13:16

HANGING LEG RAISE

This is a tough lower-ab exercise. You'll feel what I mean soon! Find a bar to hang from, and while keeping your upper body stable, bring your legs up so they end up above parallel to the ground. Since you'll be hanging, all of your core stabilizer muscles will fire to keep you from swaying too much. Keep your elbows unlocked and engage your core to also keep yourself steady.

You can either do this with your legs extended or knees bent, but the former adds a greater challenge. If you want to ramp up the difficulty even further, you can hold a dumbbell between your feet as you perform each rep. I even do them to the sides to target the obliques as well.

STABILITY-BALL TRANSFER CRUNCH

In the previous two exercises, you hit the lower and upper abs separately; during this one, you'll hit both in the same movement. One important tip here: Don't allow your heels and the exercise ball to touch the ground during the entire set—you want to keep your abs under tension the entire time.

Reach as high as you can to take or pass the ball. Getting your shoulder blades off the ground is the name of the game for upper-ab development.

DECLINE CRUNCH

You'll need a decline bench for this ab movement. This seems like a basic upper-ab exercise, but in the video you'll see that I never fully relax my abs when I lower myself to the bench, so there's no way to rest between reps. Keeping tension on the muscles like that from start to finish amplifies the burn.

There are no rules here. You can even increase the difficulty by adding a medicine ball or crossing over to one side to work your obliques, as well. Mix it up even further by jettisoning the medicine ball after you reach muscle failure to extend the set as you would a dropset.

Really, the goal is to just kill your abs. No matter how tired you are, you just gotta get through it.

AB ROLL-OUT

To put my personal twist on this exercise, I like to count to four on the descent rather than just speeding through reps. That usually puts my hands and the ab wheel fairly far out in front of me—a far greater challenge than a short range of motion.

Only after full extension do I engage my abdominal to bring the ab wheel back toward me. I know this is going to tire you out fairly quickly, especially if you've never done roll-outs this way before, so try other rep speeds to work the muscle in slightly different ways.

Be sure to tuck your chin, but keep it off your chest. Also, remember to round your back, rather than arching it, to better engage your abdominal