Dr. Andy Galpin

Step three, we would progress to say a decline or a weighted crunch.

So again, we're doing the eccentric portion.

So you're going to start up maybe with your elbows towards your knees, and we're going to work on holding a plate or a kettlebell or a dumbbell and lowering it back down to the ground.

Now, why this becomes a challenge is this will expose bad technique.

One coaching cue I like a lot here is when you're doing flexion work to move one vertebrae at a time.

This is on the way up and the way down.

Again, I don't know that much research here, but I personally have found in myself as well as clients and athletes, you're far less likely to aggravate back pain with flexion-based activities when you literally curl up and curl down one vertebrae at a time.

So we would work on that and we would load that

assuming perfect technique.

And if technique starts to falter, then we consider that a failure.

And we just continue to work on the strength side of that equation.

The fourth progression here might be going even further with that and adding a cable crunch where we can actively move in the concentric.

So now imagine you're kind of on your hands and knees and you have a cable over top of your head and you're using that to pull the cable down and pull yourself into the crunch.

So instead of resisting

know lowering the setup you're adding load where you have to pull the setup with more force and more load in this case we're going to do a lot of repetitions this is your classic setup fifth and final phase here would be adding load to that so you know holding the dumbbell or holding the cable with added load and doing the crunchy for really really heavy for five day reps most people i'm confident in saying have never really tried to go heavy with any of their ab movements

And most people that do try it are stunned with how fast their abs grow in both strength and particularly in size.

So at this point, we've actually covered a lot of ground.

In going through look, feel, and perform, we talked a lot about exercise choices.

I kind of buried in there really quickly frequency, intensity, volume, and then talked lastly about progression.

The one variable we have not mentioned yet is exercise order.