Abdominal Exercises: 100's

Series Summary

Many people want to lose weight, and despite claims for quick fat burning pills and powders, the best way to lose weight is still through proper diet and exercise. Exercise does more than just maintain physical fitness though. Working out can also help build healthy bone density, muscle strength, and joint mobility. It can also reduce your general health risks, boost the immune system, and help with depression and insomnia. Whether your reason for exercising is to lose weight, or improve muscle mass, working out is always a good idea to help promote the health of your body and mind.

If you are trying to get rid of that stubborn belly fat or just want to tone your abdominal muscles, let our expert fitness trainer show you how to do a variety of ab exercises in this free core strengthening video series. You will learn how to do basic, intermediate and advanced ab crunches, as well as oblique curls and reverse curls. You will also learn how to do the supine bridge leg extension, bicycle criss cross and the plank pose. If you are looking for some sure fire abdominal exercises, let our expert show you everything you need to know to get your belly into shape.

Video Transcript

"One hundreds are a great contribution from the pilates world, that we're going to focus on for strengthening the core, abdominals and back. The body works as one full unit. So perfecting your roll down, articulating each vertebrae and hands out to the side, relax your shoulder blades, relax your neck. Pretend like you've got a ripe peach here and you don't want to squeeze it so you've got nice space there between chin and chest. Take those feet up and you want to take them to a position where you can maintain your back to the floor or the mat, whatever surface you are working on. Once you feel that back arch that's your stopping point so you want to come back a little bit, because once that comes off the mat or the floor, exercise is over. You are no longer maintaining that neutral pelvis and strengthening the core. You are actually putting stress on the vertebrae in the back. So we're going to take our fingers and you could have a hand back here if you need to, to support, just don't pull your neck out of nice neutral position, and we're going to start pumping and you want to aim for 5 counts of 20. If you can only do 60, even if you can only do 40, but the goal is to get to 5 sets of 20, hence 100s. So we inhale for 5 and exhale. You should hear an audible breath with this and you want to maintain a gaze right down at your navel. Try not to look up but just take your focus right to your stomach and inhale, exhale, and make sure you're maintaining that neutral pelvic posture. Extend all the energy through your toes, if you need to come up, lower it, you've got to control momentum and leverage here. It's going to be a lot harder but just make that accordion effect happen from rib to pelvis. So you want to keep the distance the same between the ribs and the pelvis the whole time. If you feel like you can't maintain that either adjust your legs or come down and work through inhaling for 5 and exhaling for 5 and you pump that energy through the armpits really. So don't think about all momentum but you're controlling, everything is nice and still and you're strengthening and elongating at the same time. "