Abdominal training-Phase 2

December 19, 2008 · By Dr. Snell

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For those of you who have already been working on the initial abdominal exercises we showed on FixYourOwnBack.com, it’s time to progress that exercise to something a bit more challenging.  Remember, many commonly performed ab exercises are often aggravating to the low back due to their over-emphasis on hip flexor (psoas muscles) activity.  These exercises, fine tuned in the lab of back pain researcher, Stuart McGill, are designed to target those important core muscles WITHOUT INJURING the back.  If you have pain performing these exercises, stop, and either consult me or your health care provider for analysis.

PS- Note that the instructions for what constitutes a “rep” or repetition has changed slightly due to emerging research.  Now, we only want to train these muscles with a contraction maintained for about 10 seconds.  Perform that rep and then slowly lower your torso, switch the leg position to raise the other knee and repeat another 10 second rep.  Perform enough of these reps to get a mild burn in the abs, somewhere around 80% of what you think you could do maximally.  As your stamina improves, your ability to perform more reps should improve.  Happy Holidays!

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6 Responses

  1. JessicaGal

    May 10th, 2009 at 9:30 pm

    1

    Great! Thank you very much! I always wanted to write in my blog something like that. Can I take part of your post to my site? Of course, I will add backlink? Regards

  2. ArianaReip

    May 13th, 2009 at 4:39 pm

    2

    Your site displays incorrectly in Firefox, but content excellent! Thank you for your wise words:)

  3. Dr. Snell

    May 18th, 2009 at 9:55 pm

    3

    To JessicaGal,
    You’re welcome to use this content. Hope you find it beneficial. Take care.

  4. Dr. Snell

    May 18th, 2009 at 9:57 pm

    4

    To ArianaReip,
    Sorry you weren’t able to view well in Firefox. Not sure why not though as I use Firefox on my computer and it seems to work fine. I’ll check it out. Thanks for the feedback and hope you find the content useful.

  5. annette

    April 21st, 2010 at 8:16 am

    5

    your videos are a great training tool-can you show how these essential exercises can be modified for the less able?

  6. Dr. Snell

    April 26th, 2010 at 6:54 pm

    6

    Hey Annette,
    For beginning levels of these exercises, see the website associated with the blog. That location is http://www.fixyourownback.com. Take care.


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