Hi, I'm Bryan Francis from Billy Beck III Personal Training and Performance Center. Today, I'm going to show you how to do abdominal exercises using a towel. So, what we have set up here is we have a towel set up to a cable pulley and what Stephanie is going to do is go ahead and grab the towels and she's simply going to perform a seated crunch. So, she's going to flex forward from the spine, keeping the elbows in tight to the side, holding onto the towel the whole time. Now you see a lot of people do this exercise using a rope but ropes aren't available at every gym. So, if you don't have a rope, your gym towel will be perfect. What Stephanie is going to do is perform ten crunches in this forward position. As soon as she gets to ten, to challenge a little bit of the obliques, the side of the abdominals, she's going to position herself so her feet are angled to the side, then still continue to crunch in that forward position so she's crunching to the side of the hip. As soon as she gets done doing ten on this side, she's going to swing her legs around to the other side and still continue to do that forward crunch. Now your tempo when you do crunches, you want to do it slow and controlled. A lot of people have the tendency to pull with their arms. As you do that it's coming from the shoulders and the back, not the abdominals. So keep that tempo, nice and controlled. Now what we're going to do next is we're going to show you an advanced movement using a towel and for this we're going to go down to the floor. So what we're going to do is take your average gym towel and you want to roll it up, not that it's too thick but slightly folded and rolled if that makes sense. From this position what you're going to do is place it on the small part of the back. Now what a lot of people don't realize is the abs not only work 30 degrees of flexion moving you forward, but they also work 40 degrees of extension, meaning extending back over the opposite way. Now if we're just doing a basic crunch on the ground, we get stuck, we can only go down as far as the ground is. So what this rolled up towel does is it allows us to extend that 40 degrees back so we work our abs through a full range of motion. So what we're going to do is place the towel on the small part of the back. What Stephanie is going to do is go ahead and lay back and we're just going to perform a basic crunch just like you would do on the floor. She's going to crunch up, squeeze and now you can see as Stephanie extends down now she has more range of motion as she goes back over that towel. So she's not limited to just the floor. Crunch up one more time and extend back. I'm Bryan Francis and this has been how to work out your abs using a towel.
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