Abdominal Exercises: Bicycle Criss Cross

Video Transcript

"Bicycler crisscross is one of the most effective abdominal core strengthening exercise. Studies will show that if you were to stick a light switch on your core while you're doing this both front and back it's really going to light up. So we're going to come down and again, master your basic attempts before you move into controlling all of this momentum with bicycler crisscross. Now we want to lift into neutral cervical posture. Bring our knees into table top position, 90/90 over the hips and we're going to think of bringing, leading with our chest so we're not crossing, even though you hear the word crisscross, we're actually working into the obliques, but we're going to control all the momentum with our whole body as one unit. So we're leading without chest, we're not twisting and leading with the elbow, not even really the shoulder, and we crunch and release and then simultaneously we crunch and release the other side. Now how far you extend your legs will depend on how much you can control keeping your nice neutral pelvic posture with your back into the surface that you're working on. So as we're coming in as a result of contraction in the obliques, not as far as twisting. So we want to see a nice line between our chin and our chest bone. And inhale, exhale. Inhale, exhale. I don't need to go any further than that to really feel lateral flex in my obliques kicking in. Rotation is not the way to work obliques. That's just tweaking out the spine. To really focus in on the area you want to hit you've got to control the momentum and crunch and release, crunch and release. You can speed that up as long as you can control the momentum but usually nice and slow is much harder to work with."