Ever wondered what the best ab exercise is, well it is the hanging leg raise, period!!, but you need to perform this best ab exercise correctly to see the results.
Without doubt the hanging leg raise is the best ab exercise for faster muscle growth for a deep creviced 6-pack.
To demonstrate the key areas you absolutely must get right for the Knee Raise abs exercise, I’m going to break this movement down into 5 key areas.
The first one is grip:
Often times what happens is that your grip gives out before your abs do and you find you can’t support yourself long enough to reach failure in your abs.
The solution?
Get a set of either weight lifting “straps” or preferably a set of 1-Ton Hooks to alleviate your grip on the bar.
This allows you to “hang” from the bar without having to hold on for dear life, taxing your grip strength to failure.
Next, let’s look at the bottom position of the movement or the
“start” position:
While most people just hang straight down, this actually decreases your potential range of motion.
What I like to do is try and bend my legs, arch my back, and bring my feet up as far in back of me as possible as if I were trying to touch the back of my head with my feet.
You’ll feel a great stretch in your abs using this trick and this is where you should be starting each repetition.
The next phase is the positive movement, when you’re bringing your knees up in front of you:
Here you want to use a controlled movement that doesn’t rely on momentum to bring your knees up in front of you.
Let your abs do the work!
Breathing is also key here and you want to make sure you’re breathing out as you contract your abs and bring your knees up in front of you.
Next, let’s talk about the top position or “peak contraction point”:
While most people end the movement with their upper legs parallel to the floor, to get maximum contraction, you need to shift your hips UP and try to bring your knees up toward your head. This is what “crunches” your abs and allows you to really squeeze hard.
Hold that squeeze for a couple of seconds with all the air out of your lungs before moving into the next phase which is the negative movement.
Instead of just dropping your legs down, you want to come down in a slow 4-count descent to take advantage of gravity and the weight and resistance it offers your abs. This will help better target your Type 2 Fast Twitch Muscle fibers to really stimulate some growth and help you carve out your 6-pack.
Make sure you go through this mental checklist in your head for each repetition of your Hanging Knee Raises and you’ll see increased gains and better results from this incredible best ab exercise!
When it comes to getting a solid six pack, doing the right ab exercises is crucial. You can spend hours doing needless sit-ups that aren’t really going to have all that much benefit, much to your disappointment. Taking the time to choose smart ab exercises will save you not only gym time, but a great deal of frustration as well. In this article we will discuss the best lower ab exercises and the best home ab exercises as well.
The best movements for the abdominal muscles are going to be ones that reduce your overall stability. The reason for this is because this will require all your muscle tissues, even the ones deep within the core, to contract in order to maintain balance. When you perform regular sit-ups, for example, they are really only going to target the more superficial muscles; one that will still help, but not get you near the results you could be seeing.
So what ab exercises are ones that reduce your balance? (more…)