When doing a hanging leg raise, it's important to extend the legs all the way up.
Of all the lower ab exercises that exist, one stands out above the rest: The hanging leg raise.
When done right, it’s extremely powerful and effective. Unfortunately, most people quit half-way through each rep – when their legs are only parallel to the floor. To do it right, lift your legs up until they point to the ceiling, and are entirely perpendicular to the floor.
Here’s how to do a proper hanging leg raise:
- Locate a vertical bench at your gym. If you don’t have one, then you can do the leg raise while hanging from a pull-up bar (pictured at right).
- Raise your legs up as high as possible – much past halfway (anything less is really just a hip flexor exercise). Ideally, your legs should point directly to the ceiling, and the bottom of your spine will curl forward.
- Hold for a second, then lower your legs back to the starting position in a controlled manner.
- Repeat until fatigued (it shouldn’t take too long!).
Try do do a few sets of hanging leg raises in each of your ab or lower ab workouts.
Also, you may want to try this tip: Once your lower ab muscles become fatigued, simply bend your knees so that your legs are no longer straight. This will make the exercise a bit easier, and continue until your muscles fatigue again.
Give it a try, and let me know what you think!
DW: can you please post a video of how this would work with the bench?
It’s the vertical bench, and my gym doesn’t have one. Here’s a pic of the bench you’d use: http://www.realbeauty.com/cm/realbeauty/images/vt/rby-33-abs-hanging-leg-raises-28-de.jpg
Hey! Can you post a video on this? I bet a lot of people will Benedict from it
I agree. A vid would be very helpful I ran to my pull up bar to try it and was so confused lol.
It just seems like one of those super advanced gymnastic status work outs. It’s a bit intimidating
We do…do it in gymnastics. From there we’ll twist side to side, go over the bar open close the legs…there’s a whole lot of variation to work other muscles.
That looks really difficult…
Those looks hard..
This is one of my favorite exercises! It was a goal of mine to do three sets of 8 and it took me months to get there. But once there it looks great to do and feels great when I’m done. One thing I would tell people though is that I’m 163 pounds and the single hardest thing about this now (I can do three sets of 12) is the difficulty in holding myself up, because essentially I’m holding 80 pounds in each hand. So forearm strength helps this (doing wrist curls) and keep your form and don’t swing and you’ll really feel this one!
This workout is actually quite grand. It’s not overly difficult, it just tends to tire you out right quick.
I thought this video was pretty good as far as a demonstration would go.
http://youtu.be/G0ysNevIv0w