The ONLY 2 Ab Exercises You Need (NO, SERIOUSLY!)

in a c of exercises you think it'd be pretty damn near impossible to pick just two for you to focus your efforts on but if you apply the science to your selection it becomes a whole lot easier speaking of science Jesse give me two muscle markers that is and step with me over to the board because your job of getting a four pack six-pack eight pack or even 10 pack becomes infinitely easier if you know the right type of app exercises to do speaking of that if you're not sure what type of pack you actually

have inside make sure you check out this video cuz I break it all down for you step by step now the only shap of you not watching that video would be if you actually were unable to see my artwork yes it's backwards oh right well same point right cuz whether or not it's a piece of paper or excess body fat if you can't see the results of your hard work no matter how many ab exercises you're doing then you're not doing it right so we have to do is make sure that our nutrition is in

check and you're working on dropping your body fat level so you can actually see the results of what I'm about to show you if we take out the muscle markers we can see that there's two main things that you need to focus on and it's not necessarily the exercise is as much as it is going to be the movements the first is the guy laying on his back like this who wants to move the bottom portion here towards his head and keep his head and torso fixed in place then you've got the guy who's laying

like this on his back who now wants to move this portion towards his feet but keep the legs fixed in place well the cool part about these two movements is they're actually complimentary to each other because this exercise here where you move your lower legs towards your upper torso are going to influence more heavily the lower abdominal region in this exercise here where you move the Torso and head towards the feet is going to preferentially influence more of the upper abdominal region but we're still not where we need to be because these movements are incomplete

because we have more muscles of our midsection that make the whole thing look a hell of a lot better and we're talking about the obliques that run at this angle from both sides you can see even when I just draw them here on the board they visually create a tapering effect well the only difference between doing a bottom up movement or a top down movement in isolation is to Simply add rotation but what exactly are the two exercises well it depends on what level of ability you're at right now so let's say we're going to

focus on the bottom up rotation first well if you're a beginner my recommendation would be something as simple as a cork screw and all I'm trying to do here is clear my pelvis off the ground think about your tailbone if you can lift your tailbone off the ground by pulling your entire pelvis with your legs connected to it up towards your head and give a little twist at the top you're going to effectively hit that lower abdominal region now with that little twist we're actually as I said before incorporating the obliques as well the cool

thing here is because the knees are bent the weight of what you're lifting is actually quite easy making it a perfect option for people who are at more of the beginner level now if you're a little bit more advanced all you have to do is not necessarily change the exercise but change the amount of weight that you're lifting and it's really easy to do because in this case the weight we're lifting is our legs so if we can straighten our knees a little bit more and do this as a straight leg variation you're getting the

same effect lifting more weight through space through a greater Arc which is going to put a little bit more work towards the lower abs but also getting that twist towards the top to incorporate once again the obliques at the advanced level we have to change the environment with which we perform the exercise in and the best way to do that is to Simply hop up on a bar because now we've changed the strength curve of the exercises as well when we're laying on the ground when we get the legs up to the top the exercise

becomes a little bit easier because gravity is acting down through the legs but when we're up on a bar gravity is acting down against the legs making that weight feel even heavier which brings us back to that second movement the top down movement which should be performed ideally after the bottom up because of the weight of the legs here this is going to be the more challenging exercise than this so when you're fatigued this exercise comes in perfectly and the exercise of choice for beginners here is something called the upper Circle crunch this time the

focus should be not on the pelvis but on the shoulder blades if you can make sure that you're getting your shoulder blades cleared off of the ground without yanking on your neck to do it you're going to be doing this exercise right but we need that rotation in there too and that's where the upper Circle crunch comes in so we're going to try to work ourselves up and then around into a circle landing on one shoulder blade rolling back to two rotating to the other shoulder blade lifting myself off and continuing to work my way

around in that Circle of course you want to divide the time that we're doing the exercise between rotating clockwise and also rotating counterclockwise the edans would do something different we call this the power over and once again it's a top di movement with rotation so I'm lifting not only my shoulder blades but trying to get almost my entire torso up off the ground but keeping my lower body in place except for one little modification as I reach across my body to create some rotation I lift the opposite leg just a little bit mostly to clear

the rotation in other words to allow the rotation to happen a little bit more easily but again another great top down movement where you alternate both sides for the duration of however long you're doing the exercise most of the time 45 to 60 seconds for the advanced viewers we have a crunch pull down variation and what I like about this is it can become very Advanced because you can continue to put the weight up the stack as heavy as you can handle but what you have to do is make sure you do it right cuz

so many people screw this up they take it and they make it so damn easy that it gives you no real effect if you want to do this right you have to initiate every single repetition right from this upper row of the abdominals in other words try to fold your chest onto that top row of the abdominals try to create a crease right under your chest line if you can visualize that then you can do this right because what people often times do is they either sit back onto their heels literally moving their butt back

towards their heels which is a giant mistake because you're just letting your hip flexors do the activity or they'll try to hold down by pulling too hard on the arms I want you to Envision having the arms hooked right next to your ears and not not moving at any point and only initiating the rep from that movement of the chest the lower chest line right towards that top row of the ab see if you can make them touch it's a biological impossibility but it's still a good visualization to have if you could perform this exercise

correctly guys you could load it up like I said as heavy as you want and make a great Advanced version of a top down exercise if you do these two movement patterns you have a lot of options when it comes to top down and bottom up rotation if you're looking for more ab exercise variations of what those could look like make sure you head to athletes.com pick up our athex training system I include the athletex ab Shuffle program that gives you endless combinations of how to get the job done if you're also looking for some

help on the meal plans guys so you can show the results of your hard work I've got you covered there too if you found the video helpful make sure you leave your comments and thumbs up below and also if you haven't done so click subscribe and turn notification so you never miss a video when we put one out remember that ab exercise video I told you to watch it's right here go watch it