There are hundreds if not thousands of abs exercises that you can include in an ab workout. Naming the best ab exercise ever can be tough for sure. That said, in this video, I didn’t just name the best abs exercise but I provide the reasons for why I feel so. By the time you are done watching, you will have a new weapon in your ab arsenal that you should be able to do and feel the benefits of, very quickly.
To start, this abs exercise is a ground based movement. It is a closed chain abs movement. What that means is that your hands and feet are in contact with the ground throughout rather than having one or the other floating in the air. A hanging ab raise, while an awesome abs exercise, is not closed chain since the legs never make or keep contact with the floor.
Next, this exercise is scalable. This is important since it not only allows for everyone to do some variation of it (based on their ability level) but more importantly it gives everyone options for progression as they get stronger. Too many ab exercises are what I call “one-way”. You can either do them or you can’t. If you can, they get so easy that you wind up doing so many reps that you lose the effectiveness of the ab exercise. Not this one. Here I show you how to change the movement just slightly and keep the challenge coming.
Moving on, this ab workout option addresses the most important responsibility of your abs and core – stability. You see, ab strength is not of paramount importance when you are training your abs. Having abs that are incredibly stable is much more so. Strength would be the ability of your abs to generate motion of the spine (like in a weighted crunch) against the force of heavy weight. Stability would be the ability of the abs to prevent motion of the spine against the force of momentum and torque exerted upon them.
This particular abs exercise does this perhaps better than any other. Not to mention, it also has the benefit of allowing you to hit multiple core muscles at the same time rather than in isolation. When it comes to abs and core exercises, you really want to try and get your muscles to work together as they will in real world function. The often underworked lower ab and bottom up rotational movements are front and center in this variation.
For all of those reasons, I nominate this as the winner in the best ab exercise category. Sure, others sill have their favorites as well. However, if you are looking to put together an ab workout that is capable of delivering solid results in the shortest amount of time possible, then you will want to be sure to include this ab exercise in your workout.
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