Instead of giving you a ton of new and different ab exercises, hoping for better results, we’re instead going to talk about how to make all of your existing ab exercises more effective. We’re going to go back to the basics, and learn how to do these movements the right way.
That’s the single biggest challenge people face when doing ab movements – that they’re simply just doing them incorrectly.
We’re not just going to talk about how to do the movement, but what area of your core each exercise targets. We’re going to try to up our ab the basic muscle groups that we call our core or “abs”.
The muscle fibers of the rectus abdominis run straight up and down. Now, here’s the important thing about muscle fibers. When muscles contract, they shorten. They bring two points closer together. So if our muscle fibers in our rectus abdominis run up and down as those muscle fibers shorten, they are pulling these two points (the top and the bottom) closer together.
The biggest mistake people make when they’re doing ab exercises, when trying to target the rectus abdominis, is they do the movement with their back flat. If you are not getting flexion in your spine – In other words, bringing your head and chest closer toward your hips, then you’re not effectively targeting the rectus abdominis. Whether we’re doing crunches or even reverse crunches, we want to make sure that we’re getting that nice flexion (rounding of the back) in our spine.
