The 10 exercises for abs we use at VAULT Training, Brandschenkestrasse 150, 8002 Zürich (Enge), are the dead bug, front plank, side plank, bird-dog, Pallof press, hollow body hold, kneeling ab wheel rollout, hanging knee raise, cable crunch and kettlebell bottom-up press. Eight train the trunk to resist movement (flexion, extension, rotation), two load the abs through flexion, and six of them (1 to 5 and 10) are the bracing progression every client learns in their first eight sessions.
The order matters more than the list. Someone who can’t breathe into their belly on the floor won’t brace under a barbell, however long they can hold a plank. I’ve watched people who plank for three minutes fold under a light front squat.
What the core is for
Think of your trunk as a soda can: the diaphragm is the lid, the pelvic floor the base, the transversus abdominis the wall. Fill it with air and tighten the wall and it carries a surprising load from above. Dent the wall and it crumples under a foot. Bracing is pressurising that can on demand, and with the hip hinge it’s what I teach before anything heavy goes on the bar.
So “core” and “abs” aren’t the same word. The rectus abdominis bends the spine; the core keeps it still while hips and shoulders produce force. Three jobs:
- Resist flexion, forward or sideways (front squat, side plank, suitcase carry).
- Resist extension, so the lower back doesn’t arch (plank, dead bug).
- Resist rotation (Pallof press, bird-dog).
Most of my clients’ core work happens under a bar. The list fills the gaps. What I see at intake most weeks is the same picture: a plank that holds and a belly that can’t take a full breath.
The 10 exercises for abs, one by one
1. Dead bug
Trains: resisting extension, and the breathing everything else is built on. I start here, after a few minutes of crocodile breathing face down.
Cue: exhale fully and feel the lower back get heavy on the floor before a limb moves. If the back lifts, I don’t count the rep.
Progression: hands pressing into the knees, then opposite arm and leg, then a light kettlebell over the chest. 3 × 6–8 per side, slow.
Skip it when: never, really. If the back keeps lifting, keep the knees bent.
2. Front plank
Trains: resisting extension under bodyweight.
Cue: squeeze the glutes and tuck the pelvis so ribs and hips line up. A sagging plank stretches the hip flexors and does little for the core.
Progression: time first (20 to 45 seconds), then a harder position: feet on a box, bear plank, shoulder taps. I don’t chase three-minute planks.
Skip it when: it can only be held with the breath held. Back to the dead bug.
3. Side plank
Trains: resisting sideways flexion, plus the obliques and the glute medius of the bottom leg.
Cue: the one I use is “push the floor away with the forearm and drive the hips forward, not up”. Most people pike and tell me they’re done.
Progression: from the knees, from the feet, top leg lifted, then a band row with the top hand. 20 to 45 seconds per side.
Skip it when: shoulder pain on the supporting side. Do a suitcase carry instead (exercise 10).
4. Bird-dog
Trains: resisting rotation and extension at once. One of the three exercises Stuart McGill’s spine lab built its low-back work around (McGill, 2001), and my first choice with a back history.
Cue: reach the heel back rather than lifting the leg up. Picture a glass of water on your lower back.
Progression: 5–8 per side with a 3–5 second hold, then a band or a light dumbbell in the hand.
Skip it when: wrists or knees complain on all fours. A standing cable version works.
5. Pallof press
Trains: resisting rotation. A band or cable pulls you sideways; you press it straight out and refuse to turn.
Cue: exhale as you press, ribs down, knees soft.
Progression: 3 × 10–12 per side, then load, then half-kneeling, then a 5-second hold at full extension. A fixture in my A3 and B3 slots because it loads well and doesn’t tire the legs before a squat.
Skip it when: almost never. It’s the easiest exercise here to scale down.
6. Hollow body hold
Trains: resisting extension with the whole body as the lever. The gymnastics version of the dead bug.
Cue: press the lower back into the floor first, then extend arms and legs only as far as it stays there. Almost everyone I teach it to goes too far on day one.
Progression: knees tucked, one leg out, both legs out, arms overhead. 20 to 45 seconds.
Skip it when: the back lifts whatever the lever. That just means a few more weeks of dead bugs.
7. Kneeling ab wheel rollout
Trains: resisting extension under a long lever and real load. The hardest exercise here for most people, and the one that transfers best to a neutral spine at the bottom of a deadlift.
Cue: tuck the pelvis and keep it tucked. When the belly drops toward the floor, you’ve gone too far.
Progression: rollouts to a wall, then full kneeling rollouts, 3 × 6–10, then a pause at the bottom. I keep clients kneeling even though standing loads harder; for most of them kneeling is already the limit of clean technique, and I rarely see a standing rollout I’d call clean.
Skip it when: a current back episode, or anyone who can’t hold a 45-second plank.
8. Hanging knee raise (or reverse crunch)
Trains: spinal flexion from the bottom up. The hips flex too; the part that trains your abs is the pelvis curling toward the ribs at the top.
Cue: roll the pelvis up, don’t swing the knees. If the lower back arches on the way down, shorten the range.
Progression: reverse crunch on the floor (3 × 8–12), hanging knee raise, straight-leg raise.
Skip it when: the pelvis never curls. Someone who sits nine hours a day and swings straight legs up with an arched back is training the hip flexors. There are no separate “lower abs” either. The rectus abdominis works as one muscle, and what changes is which end moves.
9. Cable crunch
Trains: loaded spinal flexion, the rectus abdominis directly. Yes, I train flexion. The fear of crunches comes largely from laboratory studies that bent pig spine segments through 4,400 to 86,400 loaded cycles, and a review of that evidence doesn’t support removing the movement for healthy people (Contreras & Schoenfeld, 2011).
Cue: kneel, rope by the temples, curl the ribs toward the pelvis. Hips still. Pulling with the arms is the mistake I correct most.
Progression: 3 × 10–15, add weight when 15 is easy. On the floor, a dumbbell on the chest does the same job.
Skip it when: a current back episode, osteoporosis or osteopenia, or pain that gets worse bending forward. Then flexion waits until the anti-movement work is clean.
10. Kettlebell bottom-up press
Trains: whole-body bracing under an unstable load, the last step of our bracing progression. The bell sits upside down in your hand and only stays up if the trunk is rigid. A band around the waist pulling sideways adds sideways anti-flexion.
Cue: crush the handle, exhale, ribs down. If the bell wobbles, the trunk is leaking pressure.
Progression: half-kneeling holds, standing press 3 × 5–8 per side, bottom-up front squat. The walking cousin is the suitcase carry: one heavy kettlebell in one hand, 20–40 metres, no leaning.
Skip it when: any shoulder pain overhead. Keep the carry, drop the press.
A low-back history? Start with the McGill Big 3
If you’ve had back pain and it’s currently manageable, I don’t start you on rollouts and cable crunches. I start with the three exercises McGill’s lab developed to challenge the trunk muscles while sparing the spine (McGill, 2001): the modified curl-up (hands under the lower back, head lifts a centimetre), the side plank and the bird-dog. Holds of 8 to 10 seconds in a descending pyramid, say 8, 6 and 4 reps (ACE on McGill’s Big Three), most days. The goal is endurance, so nothing dramatic happens in one session.
A scan report on its own doesn’t decide what you can do, and in my experience the people who do best keep walking and keep training what doesn’t hurt. That’s the idea behind our health-focused personal training.
Ab exercises don’t reveal abs
Whether your abs are visible depends almost entirely on the fat over them, and ab exercises do very little about that. In a six-week trial, 24 healthy sedentary adults did seven ab exercises five days a week and lost no abdominal fat and no waist circumference compared with controls, while their curl-up test went from 32 to 47 reps (Vispute et al., 2011). That goes for mountain climbers too, which the old version of this post recommended for “burning abdominal fat”. They’re a conditioning drill, fine in a metcon and irrelevant to your waistline.
Is spot reduction impossible? I wouldn’t say so as settled fact. A 2023 trial in 16 overweight men found that adding torso rotation and crunches to a running programme reduced trunk fat by about 700 g more than running alone over 10 weeks, with total fat loss the same in both groups (Brobakken et al., 2023). Sixteen men and a small effect. I find it interesting, but I wouldn’t build a plan on it.
What changes your waist is what changes body fat everywhere: a calorie deficit, strength training so the weight you lose is fat rather than muscle, 10,000–12,000 steps a day and enough sleep. Those are the four things we manage in fat loss coaching. The ab work is one part of that.
How we programme core work
Core lives in the AUX slot: A3 after the first pair of main lifts, B3 after the second. It gives real recovery between two heavy exercises without stopping the clock.
- 2–3 sets of 8–15 reps or 20–45 seconds
- RIR 2–4: hard, with the last clean rep in reserve; core work taken to failure gets ugly fast
- 2–3 times a week
- Progress time first, then reps, then load, and write it down so the next coach continues the same line
A typical week for someone training twice: A3 Pallof press 3 × 12 per side on Monday, B3 dead bug 3 × 8 per side on Thursday, a side plank in the warm-up both days. Squats, deadlifts and carries already load the trunk harder than any mat exercise, and 16 quality sets per session is enough work. And no, you don’t keep swapping exercises “so the muscles don’t adapt”. I hear that one most weeks. Adaptation is the point; you change the variant when the block ends after 8–12 weeks.
Three reasons to see a doctor first
- Pain that radiates down a leg with numbness, tingling or loss of strength.
- Pain that wakes you at night or doesn’t ease with rest.
- Pain after a fall or an accident that hasn’t been assessed.
I’ll train around a lot, but not around those.
Frequently asked questions
Should I train abs every day?
No. Treat the trunk like any other muscle group: 2–3 direct sessions a week is enough, and your squats and deadlifts load it on the other days. The exception is the McGill Big 3, which can be done most days because the holds are short and unloaded.
Do ab exercises burn belly fat?
Not in any amount you’d notice. In a six-week trial, seven ab exercises five days a week produced no change in abdominal fat or waist circumference (Vispute et al., 2011). Belly fat goes down when total body fat goes down: a calorie deficit, strength training, daily steps and sleep.
Are crunches bad for your back?
Not for a healthy spine. The evidence against them comes mostly from laboratory tests on animal spine segments, and a review of it doesn’t support banning the movement (Contreras & Schoenfeld, 2011). I leave loaded flexion out during a back episode and with low bone density, and I always teach the anti-movement exercises first.
What is the best single ab exercise?
For a beginner, the dead bug, because it teaches the breathing and pelvic control every other exercise depends on. For someone already strong, the kneeling ab wheel rollout, because nothing else on this list loads anti-extension as hard.
If you’d like us to check how you brace before a bar goes on your back, book a free trial session. In the trial we take you through the first exercises on this list.