Diagonal Sit Ups for Core Training

Video Transcript

"KIRK VICKERS: All right, the next exercise we're going to do is a little bit more traditional. We're going to work on the oblique muscles. The obliques are--they come in on a diagonal fashion from the ribcage down and connect down into the pelvis. So they kinda come in this fashion here and we're going to work these specific muscles. The first thing we're going to do is we're going to lay back. We're going to go back into that pelvic-tilt position that we've talked about earlier. We're going to cross our leg and we're going to take the same arm and cross the ribcage. The next thing that we're going to do is we're going to take the opposite hand, put it to our temple and then we're going to take our shoulder blades off of the ground and we're going to slowly come up and rotate over. One of the things that I want to caution you on is that you don't support the neck and the head. A lot of people have weak musculature through their cervical spine, this area of the neck through here over the spine portion of the head and the neck in the back area. We don't want to do that. We want to strengthen that area. That's important: to train the spine as a total unit. So when we come up, we want to kinda fixate our eyes in a point on the ceiling, come up, rotate and then come back. You're going to feel all these muscles engage, some abdominals but a lot from the side. We'll do 15 to 20 and then we'll switch over, go to the other side. The leg that's crossed, same arm crossed, come up, cross, try to come up to the knee, come back not vaulting. Try not to bounce up. So keep your head and shoulder blades off. Slowly rotating, come down. Speed is not what we're looking for, slow control motion and movement."