In an effort to add more variety and changes to my strength training exercise workouts, I decided to try the ab rollout exercise using the ab wheel for the first time ever. It’s an excellent full-body exercise using basically your bodyweight to work the abs plus a plethora of secondary muscle groups.
It’s also a very challenging and difficult exercise to do if it’s your very first time, as it is for me. Since you are using your own bodyweight, you just cannot ease up on the weights. To make this exercise a little more manageable the first time, you may want to extend the rollout forwards half-way or as far as you can go like I am doing just to get the feel for the exercise and to get used to it. It’s important that you use the right form to do this exercise because otherwise you won’t be working out the abs to the fullest extent possible or rather turning this into a lats exercise. One way to do this is to take a selfie video of yourself when you are doing this exercise in order to see the form that you are using to perform this exercise and any improvements that need to be made next time you do this exercise.
Here is my selfie video of me trying this ab exercise for the first time. I recorded it after a very long and heavy shoulder workout and deadlift workout, so I was already a little tired to begin with, but it is the only time that I can record the video since my gym is usually just too busy and crowded. It’s good to see that in my area people view exercise as important.
What I noticed from the video that I recorded is that I need to rollout further forward and to crunch my abs more while rolling back to the starting position but with a little more practice reps and attention to these details, these things will come in due time.
In a nutshell, here is basically how to do the ab rollout with the ab wheel exercise:
- Begin in the cow position or camel position. The crunch position is perhaps the best description.
- Extend forward as far as you can go in the rollout.
- Roll back using an ab crunch to get back to the cow (camel) position.
This video is the best on the Internet in illustrating and describing how to properly do this exercise. Watch between the video time frame of 1:00 and 2:35 - to save you time.
