Question about abdominal exercises

So leg raises and l-sit to v-sit leg raises are to easy for me and dragon flag (straddle dragon flag also) is to hard. Does somebody know any dinamic open core exercise that is harder than leg lifts and easier than dragon flag ?

Candlestick hold?

Aadil Siddiqi said:

Candlestick hold?

Its a hold not dinamic exercise.

Dragon flags are very "upper abs" focused, while the L-movements primarly target the hip flexors. You could be looking to do situps, if too easy do hollow body hold (will help your dynamic strength too), if too easy do full hanging leg raises all the way up. You could also do tucked dragon flags or negatives but they are quite difficult to execute properly too.

Flat tuck fl pulls (rings/pbars)?

Gymnastic Bodies- Youtube video: Russian Leg Lifts

 

Gymnastic Bodies- Youtube video: Windshield wipers (1 rep equals from one side to the other and back)

You can add ankle weights and progress even further on your L-sit/V-sit. As for dragon flags, you can decrease difficulty even more by trying to lover your self in advanced tuck position, or in half lay. Try to increae time under tension on those, for example, find a leverage that you can hold for 5+ seconds and start from there. Other than that you can do back lever(straddle, adv.tuck...) with your abs tight (proper hollow body). I see most people do back lever with arched back; no abs are used there. You can also do headstand leg raises, just type on google.com you will find, great abdominal exercise, you can start in tuck, then progress to legs together and straight. If you need more, i can record few more and show you.

Thanks everybody, i decided to start with Russian leg lifts and dragon flag negatives for now.

can you post a video of your legs raise? i suppose on stall bar. if you cannot manage about 30 reps, they are not soooo easy for you.

Paf said:

So leg raises and l-sit to v-sit leg raises are to easy for me and dragon flag (straddle dragon flag also) is to hard. 

It is possible to engage lats more than it needs to be if arms are bent and shoulders are allowed to go backwards (behind hands placement). From your description it sounds like you do your leg raises mostly with lats and not so much with abs. Body lever is more demanding on abs and if is harder to engage lats with it. That is probably why it is much harder for you.

Before moving to harder exercise try doing leg raises on stall bars (or against something that prevents your shoulders from going backwards) with chin-up grip.

alex87 said:

can you post a video of your legs raise? i suppose on stall bar. if you cannot manage about 30 reps, they are not soooo easy for you.

I will post video in monday. I can do around 20-25 of them. If i do more than 10 reps in set isn't that endurance work ?

Paf said:

I will post video in monday. I can do around 20-25 of them. If i do more than 10 reps in set isn't that endurance work ?

That depends on the range of motion and the tempo you have been using.

In fact how you suppose to manage skills where it's needed always core work if you cannot perform easy endurance set?

it's like train hs for only 10 seconds and you not have energy to rest in hs during a pbars routine

GoldenEagle said:

That depends on the range of motion and the tempo you have been using.

I think my range of motion is pretty ok (we will see in video tomorrow). One rep last around 2 sec.

 

alex87 said:

In fact how you suppose to manage skills where it's needed always core work if you cannot perform easy endurance set?

it's like train hs for only 10 seconds and you not have energy to rest in hs during a pbars routine

Well i can do 5 sets of 10 with 45 sec. rest between each set, i think that is enough to move to harder exercises.

i've talked about 30 reps in a row. if you move forward you should use the previous exercise as a warm up. so if stall bar hll is your warm up think that Coach's advice for who complete foundations is 30 hll in a row.

If you want a reasonable opinion on your form to see if you can pass over please show me a video.

alex87 said:

i've talked about 30 reps in a row. if you move forward you should use the previous exercise as a warm up. your ar hll is your warm up think that Coach's advice for who complete foundations is 30 hll in a row.

If you want a reasonable opinion on your form to see if you can pass over please show me a video.

Paf is not yet capable of body levers (so also no fl or russian hll). 30 stall bar hll is asking a lot from someone at that level!

You should absolutely keep adding reps though. The active flexibility to me is more useful than the ab work per se, but it pays off well, especially when a high rep set becomes a warmup habit.

Alex is holding you to a higher standard here (because its awesome). I get that you want a harder challenge and you totally should move to something harder for your strength work, but just getting the numbers up to 10 is not enough to milk this exercise completely

And while you are working on getting your front pulls, body levers etc, adding reps, slowing itndown, or adding weight to your strict hll is a very productive way to go.

I didnt mean to stop train hll and concentrate to next harder exercises 100%. I wanted something harder becouse hll become to easy but this doesn't mean that i will not train them anymore. Thanks for mention coach advice, i'll keep that in mind. And i will upload video tomorrow.

Thank you for advice Jon.