hey what's up guys i'm rob riches welcome back to my gym workouts hey if
you're new to these videos and you haven't already seen me on youtube before let me
break down what my whole goal with this is. To kind of show you both exercises
that you might know and focus on muscle groups but also to give examples of some
of the exercises that you may not be too familiar with to show you how to
actually perform them and the benefits that they can give you. I know especially
around this time of the year a lot of people and newbies to the gym are kind
of focusing on you know the abdominal region losing body fat and maybe showing
some more shape and conditioning around the abdominal, so I thought hey let's
have a look at the typical abdominal crunch today, I'll break that down show
you why I think it's a great exercise and also maybe not the best exercise
when it comes to really working the abdominals, and then show you six other
exercise to focus on different areas of the abdomen. Before I do, shout out to
squarespace.com for sponsoring this video more on them later as well as give
you a glimpse of my brand new website that I'll be relaunching at the end of
this month, so this would be home to literally hundreds of training videos,
meal plans, nutritional information and exercises, so really a one-stop shop to
come and find out anything you need to about getting in better shape, feel
better about yourself, and more confident. Right with that being said let's first
of all take a look at the typical crunch how it works the abdominals, how not to
perform it and then start to show you some of the other exercises that I'd
throw into the mix.
So we've got a mat here in the gym, typically when we think about the
abdominal crunch it's a movement that looks like this - I'm going to perform it
how a lot of people interpret it. They sit down, they come all the way up and
then they rock back down. Are you working the abdominals there - yes.
Are you working them effectively - hmm not really and this is why - by coming all the
way down and then using a little bit of momentum and other muscle groups to pull
yourself up, you're using the abdominal muscles to lift the shoulder girdle up
but then you start to use a lot of ancillary and other muscle groups to
finish off the movement and taking away some of the strain from the abdominals.
Let me show you what I mean - by getting down onto the floor, abdominals are
really contracting in that movement
any higher up....
we're taking tension off them and using a little bit more of our erector spinae
the muscle opposite the abdominals through the back as well as some inertia
to finish off that movement. By the time we get to the top here the
abdominals might have tension on but we can't fully contract them the same that
we can down here. So if performing the crunch - focus like this; shoulders on the
mat, hands either out by the temple, crossed over or reaching out towards the
knee, whatever is more comfortable for you. I like to have them out here. Fully
exhale - and as you do so try to contract the abdominals as though you're about to
brace for somebody hitting you in the gut, it's that same technique where you
brace the abdominals and contract. Contract, and you want to curl the shoulders
just off the mat, so it's this movement my abdominals are fully contract now, so
from here to there that's the movement. You want to focus on exhaling
getting all the air out the lungs, and back down. Now, why might not this be a
great exercise? Well as you've seen it could be a little bit tricky especially
if you're just starting out by implementing an exercise regime and if
you're not fully focused on the technique and the movement it may not be
the most effective. So with that being said I'm going to show you six other
exercises that will focus on abdominal conditioning, core strength, great if you
have posture issues and just really making sure that you're training the
full abdominal region whether you play different sports, you need to improve
your posture, or like many of us, myself included, you just want to have more
definition and shape in the abdominals and the first exercise I'm going to
share with you is a cable pulldown so let's take a look at that.
Once again, this exercise might not look like I'm traveling all that far but I
can certainly feel it on the abdominals. Let me show you without the top on, I'll
lift it up, I'll perform it one hand at a time just as an example
A lot more activation in the abdominal muscles having to contract to pull not
just the shoulders down but that added resistance. This doesn't mean that you
can start adding a dumbbell or plate or extra weight when doing the crunch
because it's a slightly different movement with this one I'm putting my
shoulders down a Half-moon towards my hips, I'm not just pulling the rope down
towards the floor - that starts to work more the intercostals and brings the
shoulders into play. I really just want to isolate the abdominals, so it's this
movement - I'm on my knees, toes up at the top, nice and sturdy and my arm fixture
here remains the same. The angle here doesn't change I'm pulling that rope
down, I'm not using my arms to pull the rope. So I'm holding on to that with the
weight, exhaling & contracting the abdominals and then...
It's a small crunch, it's that Half-moon, shoulders coming down towards my hips in
that movement. We're back down to the mat for our second exercise, and for this
one I'm going to show more about the lower abdominals, which let's just be
clear - the abdominals one length of muscle, these bands of muscles really all
part of the same rectus abdominis here, so any crunch type movement either from
the shoulders coming down or the hips coming up - we're working this. A lot of us
want to kind of get this V-line here so we tend to work more of the lower
abdominals and this next exercise is a great one that engages hip action as
opposed to shoulder action, let's take a look.
We lay flat on our back, the legs come up. The goal here is not to push the legs up
towards the ceiling, we're not trying to do this..
All that we're doing is keeping the legs up which is the resistance vertically
over the hips, and then we're exhaling, contracting and we're putting the lower
abdominals inwards so that the hips curl up off the bench/mat. You'll see here
all I'm trying to do is get my toes over my eye line level, so exhale, I curl
upwards, my legs aren't going up my hips are just
moving the legs over my eye line level, which fully contracts the lower
abdominal region here. Also try not to push down with your hands, my palms are
upwards or at the side so it's the abdominals then having to curl and pull
my hips forwards rather than just using momentum or trying to swing my legs over
and just get that action from that same movement.
Medicine ball rotations or V twists, there's a few variations of this one, the
underlying principles are the same - we want to keep the hips fixed and then
we're rotating our upper torso around, so as long as you're mimicking this
movement whether it's by using a cable, some wood chops, you're on a decline
bench holding out a plate or a dumbbell, or just sat on the floor keeping the
feet supported so that they don't rock up, but if you do really want to progress
this keep the feet up in the air and then try to move side to side but as you
can see a lot more challenging, so I like to lock my feet under some dumbbells,
keep my hips firmly on the ground, arms fixed and just move that medicine ball
from side to side without bending my arms. What you'll see here is the
internal and external obliques - so these V sections here.
Which really control the rotation of the torso, so this is a great exercise for
getting more of that V-cut tapering the waist if you feel like you have a blocky
sort of waist part of that has to do with genetics but also adding some
rotations in there as well - medicine ball like this or a classic
favorite from Arnold Schwarzenegger - getting a broomstick or a light pole, not
an Olympic bar sat on a bench and just focusing on side rotations. Fully
exhaling on each one and really squeezing & contracting the abdominals. Now,
if you're unclear on what I mean by contracting, the difference is just by
turning like this and then really getting all of the air out of the lungs
and contracting the muscles in the abdomen - that's what I'm talking about
when I'm exhaling and squeezing on each and every rep and for this one 20 or 30
repetitions each time so one one two two all the way until you reach your rep target.
So exercise number four I'm sat on a Swiss ball or stability ball and that's
exactly what we're doing with in this exercise; we're stabilizing the movement.
We're moving away from solid sturdy ground on the floor and now adding in an
element that we need to control by stabilizing our muscles. This brings in a
little bit more variety of muscles to help stabilize so they're called
ancillary muscles, muscles that will not necessarily be worked through the
exercise directly but they're still involved in keeping us stable and you'll
see that I'm not sat on top of the ball like this, I'm not trying to do a crunch
where the ball is going to move under me. So my feet are positioned and anchored
securely up against the wall or dumbbells and kind of sat about
two-thirds up on the ball therefore I can stretch out the abdomen here, nice
stretch in the muscles here, and that same movement of curling my shoulders
back in that Half-moon towards my hips.
These are one of my favorite exercises for the abdominals. You can perform this
a number of different ways: straight arm like this or using the Ab supports, or
even with your arms positioned on one of those dip machines where you can do a
dip and then turn around and do abdominal supported leg lifts there. The
purpose of this exercise like with exercise number two is to get the hips
moving like this. So a lot of the time with this exercise you might see people
try to perform it with legs out straight whether they're just bringing their legs
up like this or they're trying to bring their toes all the way out to where they're
holding onto the bar. Whilst this does work the abdominal muscles I feel it
puts too much strain on the lower portion of the back and it's not as
effective as bringing your knees up towards the chest.
Side table lateral pulldowns might seem at first a little bit more of an
advanced exercise but simply by lowering that weight and focusing on just the
movement alone you can easily make this a great first starting exercise if you're just
getting into the gym and learning the ropes on all the exercises. Similar to
the first exercise with the rope pull down my arm placement here remains fixed.
I'm not using my arm to pull the rope down I'm merely holding on and the
reason I hold on to the handle like this as opposed to a handle because it allows
me to keep more of that arm fixture like that. So exhaling it's a very slight
movement down. My goal is to bring the elbow down towards my hip with this
movement I'm really not trying to go much beyond that, so it's a small lateral
motion slightly forwards, you can really see more of those obliques coming in to
play. Which I'll alternate with - you remember the third exercise, those
medicine ball rotations. So each of these six exercises are a great exercise on
their own but I like to group them together in three exercises for one
circuit. An example being on Monday I might do one, two, three of those first
exercises: the rope pull downs, the lying leg lifts and the medicine ball rotation.
Two or three sets of each, upwards of 20 to 30 repetitions and then the day after
giving a rest so let's say Wednesday I'll come back in and I'll perform
exercise number four, five. and six. therefore giving my abdominals plenty of
variety and working them from different angles. So speaking of new exercises and
workouts, my website is going to be up real soon and on here I'll have a whole
host of video workouts, exercises to follow, muscle groups both for in and out
of the gym so keep an eye out for that, I'll be showing more about that on
social media. So speaking of my new website if you're thinking about getting
a website for yourself, whether it's to rebrand a new
that you've got, or to start your very own website - I've got something just for
you: squarespace.com and see the link below
squarespace.com/robriches click on that you get a little bit of a
discount as well. This is a great platform to choose a lot of different
templates to build the style of websites that best suits you. Whether you're a
personal trainer, fitness model or you just want somewhere to showcase all of
your social media videos and photos and link everything from your YouTube videos
to social media sites, they have award-winning templates, 24/7 customer
care so you can jump on a live chat, phone them or email if you need any help.
The great thing is you really don't need any design experience or different
software to be able to build your websites like we did back in the day, so
click on there find out what's up, get your own website going and be sure to
hit me up on social media - @robrichesfitness and show me what you're creating,
let's create something new, together put it out there, pay it forwards - that's
exactly what I'll be doing within these videos over the coming month, so thank
you for watching. Let me know what you think of this video, check out more of my
videos online, and also a big shout out to the man behind the camera - Josh Morgan
aka momentum productions. He is the man with all the equipment filming these
great workout videos, so I give him some love and appreciation as well. I'll see you
back in the gym soon, thanks a lot.
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