Thursday, June 03, 2010

10 Easy Minutes to Flat Abs

My new favorite workout is the Crunchless Abs Workout #3. Whew! It feels so great. It's an interesting combination of modified yoga poses and other motions that really give your abs a fantastic workout. What I love about this abs exercise video is that it's gentle enough to do in the morning, but is seriously challenging at the same time. It gets my whole body warmed up. You must use your arms in a dedicated way, and your ham strings get this great stretch throughout. So often, abdominal workouts ignore the rest of the body, and even stress out other parts of the body, for example the neck, shoulders and upper back. And I just hate that. But this workout invites you to use your entire arms in downward dog and plank and scissor arms. And your shoulders will feel appreciated when moving quickly between a crouch and plank, shooting your legs straight out behind you. I can see that this is also a great practice move for working my way up to how they do this on the Rodney Yee yoga video I have. I never could do it on there, but this is a fantastic intermediate step to accomplishing that feat of strength: the seamless move from standing to plank. Your legs will feel stretched, lean, long, strong, when you do one of my favorite moves in this video - I'm not sure what it's called. But you do this nice fluid motion that enlists the aid of your pelvic muscles and your glutes to accomplish an exercise that doesn't feel too strenuous, but is clearly working loads of muscles. It also helps to get you to pay attention to isolating certain muscles to maintain a really still basic position while you're letting your legs glide up into the air and back down. It's a good one. You're going to feel sexier after you've done this workout. It feels so good, you might even want to try doing it twice in a row!

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