The BEST Dumbbell Exercises - ABS EDITION!

When it comes to ab training, you would be making mistake if you did not include dumbbell exercises into your workouts. In this video, I’m going to show you the best dumbbell exercises for abs, each based on a different training criteria. I’m going to cover the categories of strength, power, hyper

what’s up guys jeff cavaliere athleanx. com so today we’re going to continue our popular best dumbbell exercise series this time for your abs that’s right your abs because you actually can use dumbbells to train your abs a matter of fact you should be using dumbbells to train your abs if you want the best looking abs because just like any other muscle in your body this particular muscle group will respond to overload and we can do it with a dumbbell now are there other ways to overload your abdominal muscles of course there are you can use a med ball like I’ve done here on Instagram if you haven’t already followed us guys you can one make sure you do at athlean-x which requires that you be a quick explosive and powerful but it’s not going to appear in this video because we’re limiting ourselves to dumbbells another alternative here that I also showcased on instagram was this plate drag then I have a plank position it’s definitely something you can use to create a strength overload but as I said we’ve limited the exercise selections to dumbbells and we’re not sacrificing in doing so I am going to pick the best exercise for each of the following categories the best strength exercise the best for power for hypertrophy the best total body ab exercise of the dumbbell it actually exists something for more of a correct abuse metabolic exercise and then one that doesn’t really fit any of the categories here but is no less important and that is our best miscellaneous exercise the fact is guys as we always have done here we’re gonna put the science behind the strength why we select what we select with that being said let’s keep this list off right with a best exercise for strength all right so when we’re talking about AB strength here there’s something we probably have all experienced first hand and that is whenever we move our legs towards our head versus our head towards our legs it’s a hell of a lot harder and the reason for that is because we’re not as strong as we think we are the weight of our legs alone is oftentimes enough to overload those movements to make them a challenge however it doesn’t mean that you’re trying to shy away from adding external load if possible mad at matter of fact you can do this with a couple of different exercise selections I do think there’s a difference between the strength we have in our ABS when we move from the top down for the very reasons I just explained so I would separate this selection into two choices the first one would be when we come from the top down this exercise here the oldest up we simply have one dumbbell in your hand and the only challenge is to get to a halt sitting position here and then lower yourself back down slowly eccentric ly under control of the ABS then we swap hands we come back again you can see that the legs are not participating here they’re spread out they’re not pushing down to the floor the feet aren’t flat I’m getting no extra contribution I’m making my ABS do all of the work now if we wanted to overload the bottom-up movement a lot of us might run over to this exercise here that hang a leg raise and throw a dumbbell between our feet but if you’re doing this right here then you really not strengthen your abdominal muscles instead you’re strengthening your hip flexors which is going to cause a problem down the road particularly maybe in the form of some low back pain because you’re just lifting at the hips as opposed to doing this and that is actually trunk curling curling from the pelvis causing flexion of the spine with the strength of the abdominals but I wouldn’t even suggest this be the exercise of choice instead I would do this here and this is a dragon thrust and what we do is we set ourselves up with the dumbbell between our feet anchor ourselves to something sturdy behind us and then you simply just try to lift the pelvis up all that action of getting the pelvis lifted into the air is going to be the tremendous responsibility of the lower abs and then when you extend your legs out you’re making the moment arm longer making it more of a challenge for the ABS but you get that relief of being able to bring it back temporarily some will find that they’ll be able to actually do some repetitions here and create some additional overload that they might not have been able to do here either correctly or even at all on the hanging leg raise so it comes to power now we have to introduce something else not just the ability to move some weight or to have some external force that we can overcome but can we actually overcome it quickly can we do it in an explosive manner that is where power is and we can do this here with this dumbbell twisting toe tap so I almost preset the ABS I preload them because of the rotation stretch I get by dropping the dumbbell down to the side and then I come up and I lift by moving both the top and the bottom together to meet in the middle and then I reload on the opposite side again I’m getting the stretch reflex from both sides here and I come back up touch the toe on the other side and repeat again there’s coordination and synchronization between the lower and the top half and more importantly there’s the overcoming of an external load speed this is where power is at and I invite you guys to try this exercise and you’re gonna love it so when it comes to hypertrophy that’s actually something you should not avoid when it comes to the abdominal muscles a lot of us think I don’t want to get big ass because they’re gonna become bloated looking that’s not actually true at all remember if we’re lean enough the development of the ABS the hypertrophy of the abdominal muscles is going to create abs that pop abs that are more visible and my favorite way to do that here is with the weighted levitation crunch now this is a slow movement this is one we’re not moving very much at all but it has the incredible benefit of an overloaded East centric and we do that because we introduced this physio ball and when we land the physio ball you can see that when I lay back over it I’m getting a stretch on the ABS I’m getting an exaggerated stretch on the ABS then I then have to come out of that elongation that eccentric contraction in the ABS is something we don’t often get especially when you think about the fact that most of our ab exercises are done flat on the floor and we can’t go past the neutral position on the ball we can when we come out of this every single contraction should be purposeful you should think about trying to contract each row of the ABS the top the middle bottom each row one at a time to really get an intense contraction both of those elements are something that we’re really helpful when it comes to building muscle we know that an intentional contraction and the introduction of the eccentric overload or both elements are going to help us to do exactly that to grow your abs to ultimately make them look better so when we’re attempting to create a metabolic overload with an exercise we generally pick an exercise that allows for a full range of motion and lots of contractions and as that burn accumulates we realize that it’s coming from an accumulation of metabolites hydrogen ions lactic acid things that actually start to accumulate within the muscle that make us want to cry and stop in the goal being continue don’t cry don’t stop keep pushing and that’s where the gains are best had well we can do that here with ABS but I suggest something slightly different instead of trying to get a bunch of repetitions of flexing and extending why don’t we spend a little bit more time and for stabilizing the spine but still creating a c