Abdominal musclesRecommended exercises for exercising: Hanging leg raises
The well-defined eight-pack abs are the goal pursued by all fitness enthusiasts, and there are a lot of tricks to exercise the abdominal muscles. You can do a lot of tricks just by lying on a yoga mat!
Today I’m going to introduce to you an abdominal muscle training move away from the ground—hanging leg raises!
As the name suggests, the hanging leg raise is to hang (support) the body and perform a reverse abdominal crunch! Common ones include hanging horizontal bars, parallel bars, and Roman chair supports!
This is a good abdominal muscle training action. You can often see people doing this action in the gym, on the street, and in the park!
However, although it is a good exercise, many people do not exercise their abdominal muscles too much!
Let’s see why?
In addition to the rectus abdominis, there is another group of muscles that will be heavily involved in our movements during the process of hanging and raising the legs - the iliopsoas muscles
When we lift our legs, we are actually performing a hip flexion action! Pull the femur (thigh bone) upward toward your abdomen. The hip flexion movement is mainly completed by swimming our iliopsoas and rectus femoris muscles
Especially when the straight leg is raised to 90 degrees and the legs are parallel to the ground, almost all the hip flexors are working!
So how to improve the effect of abdominal training?
The rectus abdominis is mainly responsible for the flexion of the spine. It allows the spine to bend when the lower body is fixed., let the pelvis tilt backward when fixating!
So we need to add a posterior pelvic tilt movement to the hanging leg raise!
You should do this!
1. Avoid stretching your legs too straight and bending them slightly
2. The lifting height is higher than 90 degrees!
Keeping your upper body fixed, raise your legs to 90 degrees, and imagine lifting your knees to your chest! This will cause a posterior pelvic tilt in the lower body, which can enhance the stimulation of the abdominal muscles!
3. When falling, don’t put your legs down completely (put them straight at the bottom), just let your pelvis fall back to its normal position! Then continue the action