How To - Crunches

Monkey foot crunches! A couple variations here. Straight leg, much more intense, or bend knee, bend arm, crunching in. You're going to want to use a weight in both the hands and the foot. If you only have one monkey foot, you're going to have to do both sides. If you have two monkey feet, you just save time.

So to start off, we're going to find a little bit of a hollow position here. Neutral lower back kind of gently pressing into the floor. Like if there was a bug there, you're not going to kill it, but you're touching it with your back. The ribs are pulled in. I'm going to start with the harder variation. So straight leg.

I'm reaching that heel to the wall, reaching my fist to the wall. And then I'm going to lift through reaching up toward that foot and then backed up back down, you don't have to curl all the way up. If this is as high as you want to go, perfectly fine. Just a little bit of a lift that works. You want to make sure that you are exhaling as you're lifting full exhales, going to get that transversus abdominus pulled in so that you're not bulging your belly outward when you're doing these exercises.

Now, if the straight legs too difficult. You're going to be lifting that leg up, bending the elbows, curling in toward one another and back down. Nice and slow. It isn't about how many repetitions you do. The speed and the intention of the activation of your abdominals is going to determine how many you're going to do.

Nice and slow. You're going to get a lot more out of this than just cranking through a bunch of reps. And even this is just five pounds, five pounds, I'm on fire. So you don't need a lot of weight here.