20 intense abs exercises to add strength and size to your abdominals! Both lower and upper abs are effectively targeted.
Like every muscle group in the body, abdominal muscles need to get work done in order to grow big and strong.
Working specifically your abs is more important if the only form of training you do is going to the gym: if you do sports, martial arts or something similar, your core can get plenty of work done.
Your waist and core is actually very complex and requires tons of different stimulus to get fully trained. Usual abdominal work won't suffice, but movement based training will.
For example, if you practice movement or follow our Movement 20XX program, you know that many movement drills will make your abs and rest of the core burn like never before - and this happens in almost every movement that you do.
This is due to the fact that your core needs to stabilize your body all the time while often needing to bend or rotate your trunk.
It's no wonder many dancers and athletes often have amazing abs. The abs are continuously worked in their movement training which makes the abs grow stronger, bigger and more defined.
If you think you want to do more core work (it's almost always beneficial), you can add several of these abs exercises in the end of your normal workouts or Movement 20XX workouts.
The abs exercises which involve the movement of your lower body (like hanging knee raises), will train the lower fibers of your abs. The abdominal drills where your upper torso is mainly moving, will target the upper fibers of the rectus abdominis.
Try different ones and preferably cycle them in each workout. This means that you do different ab exercises every time you workout your abs.
For abs, 10 to 20 repetitions per set is often the best range. Only in brutal exercises like ab-rollouts, you should aim to keep the rep range low. You can do one ab exercise for 2 to 3 sets and then switch to another one.
Train hard, stay safe.
Good ?