Lower Ab Exercise Mistakes (REVERSE CRUNCH!)

Hit your lower abs from every angle in 12 weeks here…

what’s up guys jeff cavaliere athleanx. com so today I’m going to show you the right way to do a reverse crunch because the reverse crunch is a great lower ab bottom-up movement to help us develop those lower abs better if we do it the right way you see there’s a lot of ways to do the reverse crunch you can do it with straight legs if you do with bent legs which is the best way to do it let’s show you right now first of all let me show you some of the ways that you probably either have done them yourself or see others doing them right here I’m showing you an example that’s actually one of the more common ways that you’ll see it done but it’s actually the worst way to do it because you’re actually making the exercise the easiest at what’s supposed to be the hardest point in the range of motion when you get to the very very top we call this the heels to the heavens you really should be trying to press your heels right directly up into the ceiling but if you allow your heels to go past that point past vertical to point where they’re over your head think about it guys now gravity is actually helping you it’s pushing your legs back in that direction and taking all the work off of the ABS so you want to definitely stop it vertical in terms of how far back you go if you want this exercise to stay with the focus on the lower abs next to see a whole hell of a lot of momentum being used in this exercise because we have the opportunity to rock on our own tail bones rock on our pelvis and get a lot of momentum going in that backwards direction the goal here guys is never again with ab work or anything else it’s not just to reach a certain numbers to do it the right way so even if you cut down your rep significally by doing this the way I’m showing you today you’re gonna get better effort out of your abs and that’s the whole point of this is in the first place so you don’t want to use this extreme lamenting that I’m showing you here when I’m literally pulling the weight of my legs back allowing it to help me get back up and then actually not controlling them at all as they work their way back down towards the ground in both cases not something you want to do the next thing you’ll see is this shortening of the legs and this happens a lot just as an automatic compensation because remember our bodies are smarter than we are we’re going to look for the easy way out when you’re trying to challenge yourself and change yourself and ain’t going to happen if you take the easy road out well if I show you here well about you’ll get a better idea watch as I bring my feet up towards the top everything looks good but when I lower my legs back down to the ground because I don’t want to have to control all the weight of my legs against gravity I can shorten them I can shorten them by just bending at my knees now there’s not as much weight having to be controlled against the force of gravity so let’s just say my legs weighed 50 pounds apiece now they might weigh 25 pounds apiece because we’ve shortened the distance of how much is exposed to the force of gravity so it makes it a lot easier for us then when we get back down to the ground we automatically think we’re doing it right because we straighten the legs out and then lift up again probably using some more of that momentum if you want to make this really really effective you’ve got to try to maximize the length of your legs all the way back down or as I’m gonna show you the next step maybe not all the way down but at least get them as long as you can possibly make them by making a concerted effort to straighten out contract your quads make your legs as straight as it can be to increase the amount of weight that your lower abs will have to handle and lastly picking up on that point I just referenced maybe sometimes you don’t want to go all the way back down to the ground because there’s a different challenge that your abs face when you try to keep it closer to the contracted position think about it what’s natural the natural reaction is to try to get some stress off of your abs therefore letting it go all the way back down till it’s fully to the start position really but if we keep it in that contracted position now it’s sort of a full-on onslaught of contraction here that we have to be stronger and able to be it to be able to control it so here you can see that by shortening the amount that you allow your legs to travel back down towards the starting position we can make this even harder try it yourself don’t fight the urge to let your legs go back down to the ground and instead try to stop the downward momentum reverse that with another strong contraction of your abs to get them right back up again to the top you’re gonna try to it’s almost like the a plyometric version of an ab exercise because you’re trying to quickly go from that eccentric phase back to the concentric phase again shortening that amortisation phase that they have which is that transition between the two do a little bit of that I’ll promise you it’ll be a much feeling that you ever used to especially on this movement so as you can see guys there’s a lot of ways to do ab exercise there’s a lot of them unfortunately in the wrong way the wrong way if you want to get the most out of the time that you spend doing the exercise and I think that should always be our goal here if we try to work a little bit harder we can actually shorten the time that we spend doing that whatever workout we’re doing because we can get more out of it a lot of guys shy away from that they think that if they just put in the time that that will equal the results that they want but that’s not how it works effort will never be anything that you can overlook effort is everything and if you don’t pay attention to it and the effort that you’re giving you’re going to shortchange the results that you see hopefully you’ll find a lot more that you can take from this to apply more effort in your training and hopefully you’ll be able to do the same thing with all the workouts that I give you guys matter of fact our entire athlean-x training program shows you how to extract the most effort that you’ve got in the shortest period of time so I can guarantee that you get the best results possible you can get that guys in our athlean-x training systems that’s my promise to you I will do my best to get every ounce of effort out of you to get the most that you’re possibly capable of you can do that again at athleanx. com in the meantime if you found this video helpful leave your comments and thumbs up below and tell me what you want to see guys washboard Wednesday once every week I’ll cover the core you got to tell me what you want me to do alright I’ll be back here again soon