Q6: What are good ab exercises?

We've divided the exercises into upper and lower ab exercises. Note that there aren't two separate muscles that you can truly isolate, so all the exercises stress the whole abdominal wall. However there are "clusters" of muscle separated by connective tissue (these make up the "washboard" or the "six-pack"). You can focus on the upper clusters by moving just the torso and the lower clusters by moving the pelvis.

For the lower abs, in increasing order of difficulty:

• lying leg raises
• reverse crunches
• vertical lying leg thrusts
• hanging knee raises
• hanging leg raises

For the upper abs:

• ab crunches
• 1/4 crunches
• cross-knee crunches
• pulldown crunches