🏋️‍♂️ 5 best ab exercises for beginners

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Here’s everything you’ll find in today’s edition:

• A 7-time Figure Olympia champ’s top ab exercises

• The exercises you need to be doing for weight loss

• Lifting faster for strength

Exercise Tips

For Olympian Abs

Getting lost in the weeds of ab training can be a real danger for beginners who definitely know they want a tighter, harder-looking waist but get confused by the sheer mass of core training options, gadgets, and workouts available.

Enter Cydney Gillon. A seven-time Figure Olympia champion with rock-solid abs seemingly forged out of iron, Gillon thinks simplicity is key. To that end, she offers up five midsection-blasting ab exercises beginners should focus on.

The only equipment needed is a Bosu Ball and a foam roller (and really, you can get away without either if you absolutely cannot find them). Gillon is less interested in your set and rep scheme than she is in you just doing the exercises as hard as you can, so turn your brain off and work your way through these movements to build the base for the abs of your dreams.

From Our Sponsor

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Weight Loss

For That Sweet Sweat

As summer toils on under its intense sunny haze, it stands as a reminder that your yearly weight loss goals don’t begin and end on that Memorial Day beach outing that always offers so much promise.

While diet is undoubtedly an important factor in weight loss, exercise stands as another of the pillars required to hold up the House of Adipose Reduction. The nine exercises below, hand-picked by BarBend’s staff, offer the perfect selection of physical exertion needed to maintain the long campaign you consistently wage against unwanted body fat.

With an activity chart cribbed from the oldest university in America — a small school across the river from Boston called Harvard — you can review each activity’s potential to burn calories. From running to jumping rope to brisk walking, there are ample opportunities to find some level of physical activity to fit your lifestyle, likes, dislikes, and general preferences. With nine options to choose from, there is no excuse to avoid getting up, getting active, and getting down with one of these exercises designed for weight loss.

Strength Training

Lift Fast, Don’t Die Young

Almost a century after some guys in Russia started talking about it, and since the glory days of the 1980s when Louie Simmons started banging the drum on the subject, there is, somehow, still controversy about whether lifting weights faster has practical application in developing maximal strength.

In this article, Dr. Layne Norton plies his trade by delving into a scientific meta-analysis of total strength accumulation with the use of variable lifting speeds in training. Clearing up the confusion between strict hypertrophy training, where time-under-tension TheoryCrafting might indicate slower reps are better, Dr. Norton spells out the concepts of force production, velocity, and systemic strength gains as only he can. Click below and find out if moving faster is the right way to attack your training goals.

Everything Else

Setting a High Bar

• The commercial availability of barbells has come a long way since the dark days of the dominance of strip mall mega-gyms. These 11 barbells are perfect for both home gyms and high-volume training environments.

• Pure Protein bars are among the most popular and visible on the market. BarBend has a registered dietician take a deep dive into the nutritional aspects of this protein-heavy snack food.

• Legendary bodybuilder Dorian Yates kicks off his new monthly podcast series by talking to Tom Platz about his journey to find the right training protocols for his body type.