Not Just a Man's World

2 years ago I was still working away at my abs with little success.  I was trying every exercise I came across but my abs were so weak that anything that was too hard for them gave me lower back ache.  Lying on my back on a bench or the floor could even cause my lower back to ‘click out’ so that I would be unable to sit up again without assistance.

I could spend months working away at an exercise getting little or no improvement because I didn’t even have a basic level of strength.  I’ve found that most sites that recommend abs exercises don’t mention how much basic strength you need to be able to get some benefit from their exercises so I was often trying to run before I could walk and frequently finding my face plastered in metaphorical mud. 

Over three weeks, I’m setting out the exercises that I have tried and providing a suggested progression order based on my experience so far.  The areas I’m covering are:

• Part 1:  Entry level abs exercises
• Part 2:  Building functional ab strength
• Part 3:  Advanced abs exercises

So let’s talk about building some functional ab strength (with some photos from a below-freezing temperature garage gym).

Decline bench sit ups

Personally I’m not a fan of sit ups and crunches.  However if you are determined to do them then you’ll find that this variant gives you a lot of bang for your buck due to the increased range of motion.  Just be careful to not use your lower back to do the exercise.

Lie on the decline bench with your head below your knees and legs hanging off the end of the bench (you’ll probably want to hook them round the bench leg).  Sit up using your abs and keeping your lower back flat.

To progress this, hold a weights plate or dumbbell to your chest.

Dragon flags

I love these due to the enormous range of motion you can get.  Incline a bench so that you can lie straight on the bench with your feet on the floor and your head raised up.  Hold onto the bench behind your head – a lot of the power for this comes from the death grip on the bench!

Keeping your legs straight raise them up in the air until your glutes have left the bench and then lower back down again, continuing to keep your legs straight.  By doing both directions of movement slowly you can get as much benefit from the lowering phase as you can from the raising part.

Include this as part of your normal workout until you can do several sets of eight or ten repetitions.

Hanging knee raises

I tried to introduce this exercise into my program far too soon and found that despite months of perseverance I didn’t progress.  As with pull ups, if you can’t do one or two repetitions it’s difficult to get any training effect to develop further.  However, if you can do several sets of multiple dragon flags then you should find you can do a couple of good repetitions of this.

Hang down from a pull up bar, grip the bar tightly and bring your knees to your chest.  It sounds easy enough but you can’t count a rep if your knees don’t both come up past horizontal and you may well find that one leg lags behind the other and you need to concentrate to get it to come up as far.

Weighted dragon flags

Once you can do dragon flags without any trouble, attach a small weight to your feet to do them.  I do this by threading a dumbbell plate onto a climbing sling and looping the sling over my feet.  You can then make this into a progressive exercise by slowly increasing the weight.

Be warned that a tiny change in weight on your feet can make a big difference to the difficulty of the exercise.

Side bends with dumbbells

Personally, I don’t recommend doing side bends until you’ve got some really good functional ab strength.  The problem I had was that it was very easy to twist my upper body round slightly as I did them, especially on the barbell version that I will describe next week.  While the purpose of the exercise is partly to stop this from happening, it can be difficult to progress and increase the weight without developing poor form unless the basic strength is there to begin with.

Stand with your feet shoulder width apart and with a dumbbell in one hand.  Ensure your shoulders are in a good position, with your shoulder blades tucked back.  Breathe in, tighten your abs and bend sideways towards the dumbbell.  Don’t twist forwards or backwards as you go down. 

Once you’ve bent over a decent amount (I aim to get the dumbbell near my knees) straighten up again.  This is when your abs do the work.  Repeat on the other side.

Next week, I’ll cover the exercises that I am still working towards at the moment.

Related posts:

1. Core workouts (Part 3)
2. Core workouts (Part 1)
3. 15 Ways to Survive a Desk Job – Part 2 (workouts)
4. Lessons learned this week: grip workouts