With Just A Few Good Lower Ab Exercises And Proper Diet, You Can Create A Truly Impressive Core

To compliment my last post on oblique exercises, I thought it would be good to write a post focusing on some good lower ab exercises and the best ways to really develop this hard to target area. Much like the oblique muscles, your lower ab workouts should not be focused on building larger muscle, but rather on building solid, condensed and defined muscle.

If you have been doing crunches, weighted crunches, roman chair sit-ups and so on, then this is going to help you a lot … stop doing them all together! If you are completely new to working out and have never done crunches before, it probably is a good idea to do a few just to develop a good mind to muscle connection so that you learn how to contract your abs efficiently, but once you’ve got that down, you really do not need to do anymore crunches.

Some Good Lower Ab Exercises

Lying Leg Raises
Lay down on the floor, a mat or a bench and place your hands by your side or under your hips. Slightly lift your head and shoulders and straighten your legs out. Concentrating on your lower abs, raise your legs and stop before you lose tension on your abs. When you lower your legs back down do not touch the floor.

Hanging Knee-Ups
While hanging from a pull-up bar or whatever is available to you (you can even do these on parallel bars) pulling with your abs, raise your knees up to slightly above 90 degrees and return slowly. Repeat.

Hanging Leg Raises
As with the hanging knee-ups, you can perform this on any type of bar as long as you are hanging. Concentrate on using your abs as much as possible and try not to rock or swing your body.

Some Bad Lower Ab Exercises

I’m sure you know how to do these, but even if you don’t, I’m not going to elaborate since they are far from being good lower ab exercises. Crunches are adequate (not so much for lower abs though) but even then, all of these exercises increase the risk of back injury and don’t promote great abs.

• Situps
• Hanging / Roman Chair Situps
• Weighted Crunches

If you think about doing these ab exercises, your abs are only flexed while your are crunched up in a ball. Unless you want to walk around hunched over, you should train your abs to look great while you’re are standing.

Although they aren’t necessarily lower ab exercises, a great way to do that is to do planks and renegade rows. These will create a dense and defined look while your body is in a straight line because that is how you perform the exercises.

Creating a Defined & Impressive Core

Yes, I’m sure that you have already heard this but it doesn’t matter how many lower ab exercises you do, if you do not have low enough body fat you’ll never be able to see your abs. Diet is actually just as important as the ab workouts themselves, actually, more important. Someone with low body fat can have some ab definition without doing any ab-specific workouts. But someone who does even “the perfect” ab workouts could never have a defined core if they aren’t at a low enough body fat.

Once you’ve dieted down to where your abs will show, you will really start to see a difference in doing these lower ab exercises. But because you don’t want your abs to be big muscles, you can change up the way you work them to maintain an ultra defined look.

What I have found to be the best way to a flat and hard stomach is a plank workout. For an awesome plank workout that I have outlined, checkout one of my previous articles about the best core exercises to work your abs and get a flat stomach.