Effective and safe ab workouts for girls should consider the physiological make up of girls and the differences between girls and women as well as men and women.
What makes a girl a woman physically has nothing do to do with capabilities or maturity. There are physiological differences that occur in girls before, during and years after puberty that impacts their control over the ab muscles especially their lower abs as well as their tendons that impact all the exercises.
A strong girl who is self-aware recognizes these differences and works with them during the difficult years of wild hormonal fluctuations.
Women are also different from men anatomically in many ways. Women have a wide your hip than men. Their wider hip is necessary for the process of pregnancy and childbirth and impacts how women’s hip and knees function together during motions.
The third difference that should be part of the workout for girls from the exercise point of view is a tendency for women to use the front of their legs and their quadriceps more than the back of their legs their hamstrings during exercise.
Effective and safe girl workouts consider these three differences.
Below are two exercises you could do in a row that makeup and effective workouts for girls.
Plank – Most ab workouts require hinging at the hips against a load. Crunches and situps are examples of this.
Hinge at the hip against load or gravity engages your quadriceps and transfers some pressure to your lower back.
Engaging your quadriceps is something women at any age need to reduce or balance.
Plank exercise provides an opportunity for women to engage their entire core by flattening their back without hinging at their hips.
Plank means a straight board without any curves. When you focus on keeping your back flat you do engage your abs and your entire core.
Stability ball hip lift – Stability ball is an inexpensive tool with a lot of versatility for everyone regardless of age or gender. Ab workouts need to be balanced and engage the entire core not just the front of the body with the six packs are visible.
By lying on the ground and placing your feet on top of a stability ball, your entire core gets engaged to help you maintain your balance and fall of the ball.
As you lift your hips off the ground, again, focus on keeping your back flat and control the tendency to arch your lower back. By keeping your back flat in an inverted position, while you’re facing up, you engage your glutes and your hamstrings.
The combination of the two keeps your pelvis aligned which helps relieve some of the low back pain often young women experience.
You can perform the plank for about 30 seconds and then move to about 12 repetition of the stability ball hip lift and repeat the process three times.
As you get stronger you can hold a plank for longer. And increase the number of repetitions of your hip lifts.