This article is based on an expert interview with Monica Morris, conducted by wikiHow Staff Editors. Monica Morris is an ACE (American Council on Exercise) Certified Personal Trainer based in the San Francisco Bay Area. With over 15 years of fitness training experience, Monica started her own physical training practice and gained her ACE Certification in 2017. Her workouts emphasize proper warm-ups, cool-downs, and stretching techniques.
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Looking to get toned, defined abs? Choosing the right ab exercises will set you up for success, but which ones will give you the best results? Don’t worry—in this video, certified personal trainer Monica Morris breaks down her favorite ab exercises plus how to get the fastest results from your ab workouts.
Any crunch will improve your abs. The technique that I like to aim for when talking about abs is that, when you do a crunch, when you're going let's say elbow towards knees, which is generally the idea in any variation of crunch, if you take about 10 seconds to exhale as you do it, just one inhale and then as you crunch forward, you're exhaling for that 10 seconds, even counting, the burn comes faster. So you should only be able to do about 10 crunches. Another tip for that is to aim to crunch your shoulder towards your hips rather than elbows towards knees. You're contracting your abs and squeezing your ribs towards your hips, your chest towards your hips, your shoulders towards your hips, but you're trying to crunch towards there rather than the knees. And with that said, if using those techniques, the standard regular crunch, I call it a breathing crunch, is definitely the best. And just to add one little piece is that there's four major parts of the abs. So you can't—there is no one particular one. So bicycle crunch for obliques, and middle breathing crunch, the traditional one for the top, and then for the lower abdominal muscles would be feet hanging from a bench leg raises.
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