I just don’t have much experience with trunk/ab exercises besides watching the silly BS at the gym because I’ve been conditioned to think it is futile from years of SS dogma.
The Bridge calls for “isometric ab exercise for 7 minutes” so I do various isometric holds. Standard Plank, Plank on the elbows, one handed (side, thanks eric) planks, V-sits, and when I’m feeling ambitious, I throw in some dragon flags.
edit: refined a term for some of the planks I do
-toes to bar
-ab wheel roll outs
-v sits
-L sits
-standing ab wheels
-side planks
-decline sit ups
The key for me is whenver I get bored of a movement, I change it. GPP is get super boring if you don’t change up your movements and do things you like. For example, I might change movements every week, or I might stick with them a whole block. Yesterday I went in for GPP and was planning on doing planks, but my gym put an impromptu “toes to bar in 6 minutes” competition that I decided to jump in on. Just have fun and do what you like while staying in the confines on the templates
Situps were a tested event for me in the Army, and I had to work HARD to max out my points in that event. If you are looking for ideas on more dynamic abb exercises rather than the isometrics, these were my standard go to’s in order of preference (I didn’t have no fancy ab wheel) 1. Sit ups (someone or something holding my feet down). Mix up the “sets reps” scheme. Occasionally, I’d also just do 2 minutes, as many as I can, which was the tested event and is a killer.
2. Situps on decline bench
3. Situps on decline bench with a weight hugged to chest
4. “Obliques” (like a situp, but put one arm out to the side, and with the other hand behind the head, touch that elbow to the opposite knee)
5. Crunches
6. “Frog Kicks” (best on a bench)
7. Supine bicycle
8. Leg lifts on that padded stand thingy (knees straight or bent, sometimes work in a torso twist)
9. I’ll also suspend myself various ways with upper arms parallel to the ground and touch my knees to my elbows
10. Supine leg lifts (These go up a notch or 2 if you have someone standing at your shoulders with you holding their ankles and they push your feet back down hard each rep, and you fight it) In case it hasn’t come across, there are a LOT of variations you can mix in for ab work. The exercises involving bringing the legs up seem to do more for the lower abbs, while the ones where the upper body is providing the weight seem to do more for the upper abs.
I do ab wheel roll outs. If you cannot quite roll out all the way, a great tip I got was to do them facing the wall. You roll out partially till you hit the wall and once that gets too easy, you move back further and so on until you can roll out all the way.
AB roll outs to failure then just do the eccentric portion. Either that or AB crunch machine.
Well it’s GPP day, so I’ll give some of these a try. Thank you!