Ab Wheel or abdominal wheel a great exercise for your abs
What is the abdominal wheel?
The abdominal wheel, also known as the ab wheel, is a very simple device, two handles connecting a wheel. But don’t let this simplicity fool you, this advanced training tool, used correctly, builds strong triceps, lats, and overall abs.
The rationale for this exercise with a wheel is that the function of the abdomen is not to flex the torso but to prevent it from going into extension. In this way we prevent our spine from being in any potentially harmful position while we train with our abdominal wheel. In addition, regarding the plank, which is another of the most common abdominal and lower back exercises, it creates greater instability when working with our abdominal wheel, so it is important to know what level we are at to do the abdominal wheel exercise that is adapt to our physical state.
There are opinions of all tastes about the abdominal wheel, but a study was carried out that cleared up many doubts about whether this exercise was the most effective for developing the abdomen. The American Physical Therapy Association examined different ab exercises such as the crunch, sit up, reverse crunch, knee-to-chest raise, double crunch, oblique crunch, and inverted crunch with a not-cheap ab machine, the pike knees. to the chest from plank and abdominal wheel.
Through an electromyography on the rectus abdominis, the internal and external oblique, latissimus dorsi and rectus femoris, it was established that in all cases with the ab wheel the exercises generated more muscle activation.
History of the Ab Wheel
The ab wheel was created in 1994 by Don Brown, a personal trainer from Pennsylvania who wanted to design the best ab machine since his clients were still working out lifelong crunches that are potentially harmful and end up with back pain doing crunches. , so he became obsessed with designing a device to keep the back straight and ended up arriving at his Ab Roller for abdominals, also known as the Ab Wheel, depending on what the device for doing abdominals is called.. After the success of his product, later designs and creates other ab products like the Ab Coaster or Ab Solo with his company “The Abs Company” which supplies gym products to more than 10,000 sports centers in more than forty countries. Once the abdominal wheel patent expired, virtually every sports company created its version and it became extremely popular due to its low price and high effectiveness. Today, when asked what is the best device to do sit-ups, it is practically unanimous that it is the abdominal wheel.
Today one of the most famous models is the domyos abdominal machine, sold at Decathlon. With this Domyos product, abdominal exercises, you can do all the roller exercises for abdominals that you want at a cost of less than ten euros.
How do you do abdominal roller exercises?
Before starting to work with the ab wheel, two things must be determined: if we have enough capacity to work with the ab wheel or if we should opt for other options before starting to use it and what is our range of motion. We will explain both concepts in this article about our favorite abdominal wheel.
The most important thing to do an abdominal wheel correctly is to have enough core strength to keep your back straight, if we are not able to perform a repetition of the abdominal wheel without falling into hyperlordosis, we are still not ready to train with our favorite toy . To have a stable abdomen, we recommend reducing the fat percentage in case it is high and practicing planks until we can stay in a plank on our elbows for about a minute.
It is also important to know our travel range. To do this, it is enough to lean on your back against a wall and grab a pike. Let’s raise our arms practically stretched until our back falls into hyperlordosis. The point immediately before said hyperlordosis is our range of motion when we use the roller to do crunches.
Once we are clear about this, we can add the abdominal wheel to the routine, the steps to work with the roller to do abdominals are the following:
- Grab the ab wheel with both hands and kneel on the ground
- Now place the abdominal roller on the floor in such a way that you are resting on your hands and knees. This will be your starting position
- Slowly roll the abdominal wheel until you reach your maximum range of motion, try to lower yourself as far as you can without touching the ground with your body. During this process breathe in.
- After a slight pause, return to the starting position slowly, keeping your abs tight while you let out the air you’ve inspired.
Once we know how to do the wheel, we can try to increase repetitions or make more difficult variations.
A typical progression with the abdominal wheel, the best ab machine on the market, would look something like this. The idea is that once you can do 20 repetitions with the ab wheel exercise, start practicing the next exercise and complete the previous one.
- Kneeling abdominal wheel.
- Multidirectional abdominal wheel
- Weighted kneeling abdominal wheel, using a barbell with plates.
- Abdominal wheel on a step.
- Abdominal wheel standing on a bench.
- Standing abdominal wheel with a ramp
- standing abdominal wheel
- Standing abdominal wheel with weight.
What Ab Wheel to buy?
There is no need to complicate much when purchasing an abdominal wheel, since it is a cheap abdominal device that does not require any special technology. In this way, as we previously discussed, the Domyos model can be found anywhere and it is an abdominal wheel with very positive opinions. In this way, we can acquire the best abdominal device on the market with a price of less than ten euros.
