For most of us in North America, beach season is now officially over. I experienced this first hand with the chilly downpour I was trekking through yesterday.
I also know this to be true because I get less and less questions like, "How do I get ripped abs?"
It’s not only the regular population that asks me these things, but also the pro and amateur fighters I train.
Well the short answer to the question is – eat clean. Super clean.
So clean that Mr. Clean feels like he hasn’t showered for 3 days.
Do that long enough and you’re bound to have a chiseled mid-section worthy of washboard status.
But with respect to exercise, training the core is all about function.
One of the most important concepts to understand and train is your ability to activate your hip flexors (psoas/iliacus) while maintaining core stability.
This becomes especially important when you’re throwing knees or kicks.
If you’re like most people I work with, whenever you fire your hip flexors, your abs automatically crunch and your pelvis tilts under (posterior tilt).
This is NOT beneficial because you lose the ability to rotate through the hips when it’s not in neutral position, decreasing the amount of rotation you get when you throw a roundhouse or big knee, thus decreasing it’s power.
Also, doing this brings your face closer to your opponent, so you’re head is more in range of your opponents counter-attacks – not good unless you enjoy getting KTFO!
So the video below will show you a simple exercise progression you can use to train this extremely important quality to improve the power of your kicks by increasing the strength of your hip flexors and improving your ability to stabilize your core when your hip flexors fire.
Work your way up to 15 repetitions of each progression in PERFECT FORM before moving on to the next progression.
And after you watch the video, as always, I appreciate 2 things:
- Your Feedback, Comments and Questions
- Hitting the ‘Like’ button
Thanks!
And finally, here’s the vid 🙂
In my Ultimate MMA Strength and Conditioning program, I have the Jacknife as a key exercise in the program.
If you’ve got the program and you feel ready to increase the difficulty of this exercise, use one of the variations that I show you in the video.
And if you want to make sure you’re doing this exercise at the right time in your program and it’s a part of a balanced and periodized program specifically for MMA, go get my Ultimate MMA Strength and Conditioning Program today:
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