Exercise & Fitness Tips : Abdominal Exercises

Hi, I’m Ashley Gas, strength and conditioning specialist, with brilliantathlete.com. We’re going to talk a little bit about, how to do abdominal exercises. First of all, it’s important to clarify, and we’ll keep it simple, that the abdominal muscles are the muscles in the front and on the side of your trunk. One of their main roles is in stabilizing your entire body through movement, whether you’re walking, running, or playing a sport. So, your abdominal muscles play a key role in stabilizing your whole body.

A lot of people wonder, well just, how do you choose exercises to work your abdominals, and while there are many different answers to this question. One of the key is to choose exercises that train different parts of the muscles. So I’m going to demonstrate a few that can help you get started. The first one is an exercise that’s commonly called thin tummy, and this is how it works, lie in your back, take a deep breath in, and as you exhale, just pull your belly button in towards your spine, so your making your tummy nice and thin.

You can use your fingers, just so that you can feel your belly button being drawn in, just like when you’re creating a dish with your lower stomach. You can hold that for 5 seconds or so, and then relax. The second exercise is referred to as the partial sit-up, and this is actually discussed in Stewart Miguel’s book called low back disorders. Bend one leg, straighten the other leg, hands can be across the chest, and it’s just a partial sit-up movement, I just come up halfway, and back down again.

Think of this as a controlled abdominal exercise for the front of your stomach muscles. So I might do 3 or 4, with one leg bend and straight, and then I’m going to change legs, and repeat the same movement on the other side. The third exercise is an exercise that is good start to strengthen the sides of the abdominals. So, to start with both knees bent, feet together, my knees are bent to about 45-degree angle. I’m on my elbow and my forearm, I’m going to push my knees down into the floor, and lift myself side up into a side bridge.

You’ll going to feel the muscles closest to the floor working, and then I come back down again. And to start, you might do 5 or 6 reps, and as you get stronger you could increase that to 10 or maybe even 20, with a couple second holds at the top. So again to sum, when you’re looking at using abdominal exercises, make sure that you use a few that feel like they train different part of the abdominal muscles, and you’ll be well on your way to getting a stronger, more functional mid section. I’m Ashley Gas, strength and conditioning specialist, with brilliantathlete.com.