Exercise of the Day: Leg Raises

All of us are always looking for new and better way to work our abs. The abdominal muscles can be hard to challenge because for one, you can't exactly just slap a weight on them and move them around like your limbs, and two, because your abs will adapt to any given activity quickly. And lets face it, crunches and all the variations of them tend to get boring real quick, so it's nice to have as many options as possible when you go to work your abs. Enter my second favorite abdominal exercise (the first is sprints, but that's a whole other article...), leg raises.

How you go about doing leg raises depends on your level of fitness and the equipment available to you. If your abs already have some level of fitness, hanging leg raises are the best, closely followed by captain's chair leg raises. To do hanging leg raises, simply hang from a pull up bar without your feet touching the ground. Slowly and deliberately raise your legs up in front of you until they are parallel to the floor, and pause briefly. Lower all the way down to the starting position, being sure not to use momentum to complete your next repetition. Hanging leg raises are excellent for you, providing a compound abdominal exercise that truly works all the muscles in your midsection and your lats as well.

Same idea with a captain's chair, except instead of hanging your back is braced against the chair and you hold yourself in place by using the arms of the chair to keep yourself up in the chair with your legs hanging. Lift and lower your legs just as with the hanging raises. This is still an excellent and challenging ab workout, but the chair takes away a lot of the challenge for the muscles that stabilize you when hanging.

Now, these are pretty darn challenging. Don't feel bad if you're hard pressed to complete even five repetitions. If doing leg raises with your legs straight out is just too much, bend your legs at the knee and then do the raises. For even less resistance and a leg raise you can do with no equipment, lie flat on the floor and use your hands to support your tail bone and keep the length of your spine flat on the floor. Raise your legs straight up in the air, pause, and return to start. To add difficulty to this variation, hold a small Swiss ball between your feet, or use ankle weights, as you complete your leg raises. You can also hold your legs steady a few inches above the floor for a few seconds between repetitions for added difficulty.

Have fun with these, and prepare to be sore tomorrow!