Ab-Tastic!

Let's face it, abs are one of the hardest parts of the body to attain. No one wants to do sit-ups, crunches, or planks, but sometimes you just gotta suck it up. There are plenty of different exercises to be done to help sculpt a six pack, but I'm only going to talk about the main 6 I do plus a few alternatives.
In a previous post I talked about my favorite weight loss app IntervalTimer and how absolutely amazing it is, I still stand by that claim and finally will tell you about my ab routine like I promised. You don't really need the app to do the workout but it does make things simpler, but if you don't have room for another app you can just use the timer of your phone. Just be sure to pay attention to how long you are doing each interval and set!
Now, it took a lot of trial and error before I came up with the six moves that I felt worked my abs the hardest. These are the first 6 exercises that I did when I began my ab routine:

• hold a crunch
• toe touches
• bicycles
• leg lifts
• Russian twists
• plank

*Keep in mind that these are all at 1 minute each with a minute rest between each new set resulting in a 20 minute workout in total.

After a while I realized that doing the toe touches and bicycles were actually hurting my neck half way through my second set, so I started to look for alternatives to these exercises. That is when I discovered pull overs and side bends. A pullover is when you lay down on the floor and bring your knees up as if you were sitting down, then take a weight and bring your arms down behind your head keeping them straight and almost touching the floor, then bring the back up and repeat. You should feel it in your arms and a pull in your upper abdomen. Side bends are pretty self explanatory, I take my kettle bell and lean down stretching my obliques, instead of one minute each I do 30 seconds each side.
Hopefully this can help you get your stomach ready for bikini season, or any season for that matter!