Alert: I was virtually fisted by the gym-session, and I was awake throughout the sleep.
If you’re a person who resembles me, me, you have been through fifty crunches, planks, and bicycles in order to have stronger abdominal muscles. That being said, I skipped the floor and tried a standing core workout from Blogilates this week, and my abs were on fire. This 12-minute video is short, snappy, and perfect if you want to achieve your goals, lose weight or build muscles without getting down on the floor.
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The instructor, Cassey Ho, is a certified fitness professional with Blogilates as her brainchild, and the channel is one of the top-rated for the category of female fitness on YouTube. The platform, with over 10 million subscribers, takes Pilates, resistance, and bodyweight training and fuses them in a fun and interesting manner for the viewers.
What Does This Workout Comprise of?
Such a brief workout is primarily about weight loss, and it is a good option to the floor because it accesses the core through mobility, filters out the hard exercise parts with resistance power, and takes care of doing some actions-standing. In this context, a single exercise (e.g. knee lifts with hand weights) that needs the coordination of many muscle groups becomes crucial for the practice of balance and the prevention of falls.
Cassey suggests sticking to light weights (I decided to have two 5-pound dumbbells), but if you are just starting, using your body weight is still okay.
You’ll be doing around 10 different moves, most of them being of a duration of nearly every minute, and you won’t have any breaks. Just keep going; soon, you’ll see that the minutes have gone. Making the movement more advanced, the combination of balance exercises and upward-reaching gets the core activated fully and continuously, even though no action is performed in the form of a single crunch or twist.
Walk Through Step by Step The Standing AB Workout Routine
Blogilates’ YouTube channel. Each movement really puts to the test power for the core, the balance, and the coordination.
Dumbbell Overhead March
Jump and bring your knees towards the chest while you have dumbbells above you. This will surely get your upper body and the core super ready for the go.
Dumbbell Overhead Leg Raise
Keep your back straight and move one leg up at a time, remember to do it slowly. The overhead position of the dumbbells activates the core in the whole range of motion.
Dumbbell Overhead Leg Sweep – Right
Keep an overhand arm grip and pull your right leg out, then move it back to the original position and then move it out to the left side. This also helps to balance and strengthen the side muscles.
Dumbbell Overhead Leg Sweep – Left
Do the same routine on the other leg. It’s crucial to ensure that you’re moving slowly and your balance is well aligned before changing the direction of the movement.
Squat to Overhead Press with Rotation
The entire body is in this workout. Open your door for a squat, lift the weights, unfold your body [in front], and hitting the lines of the torso.
Forward Lunge with Twist (Alternating)
Step onward, down to lunge, and twist your upper part of the body to the leg side and keep your midsection tight.
Single Leg Reverse Fly – Right
Hold onto your left leg and tilt your body towards the ground, then open your arms to the sides. Additionally, the move will engage your middle and back muscles corewise.
Single Leg Reverse Fly – Left
Do the same thing on the opposite leg. Put your focus on your feet and your body’s smooth and steady movement.
Side Dip – Right
Take a dumbbell and bend your body to your right side not the hip only. This way, you are really going to get a good workout on the sides of your abs.
Side Dip – Left
Replicate by bending to the left. In other words, this is the final repetition. Obliques will surely be feeling the burn after doing this exercise.
What Are the Advantages of This Workout?
One of the main highlights for me was the pragmatic function of the session. When you are working out, you use your core muscles for the real strength necessary for real-life activities — that is posture, balance, and day-to-day movement.
What really makes the workout effective is that you do not rest your abs at all. Your abs are engaged in keeping your body in awkward positions, and that strengthens them. Periodically intensifying exercises with one hand and lifting weight overhead, your muscles are always in the condition of engagement throughout the entire workout.
At the end, I was soaked, the core had become a cinder, and my shoulders and lower abs were still burning. Besides the balance obstacles, much more strenuous than it appears to be.
And it’s not just that, this workout also can cater to a larger audience:
- People with back pain who do not want to be involved in floor exercises at all
- Individuals who require immediate and effective ab workouts as they cannot spend a lot of time on that
- Fitness lovers who are tired of the traditional workout and are now seeking new things
- Those who are seeking to strengthen their body and also have a higher range of motion in one training session
Cassey’s 12-minute standing ab workout is a brilliant example of how to engage the core without doing crunches or planks. It is quick, fun, and surprisingly challenging. I will now incorporate this into my weekly set of workouts — especially on the days when I do not feel like using the mat but still want to burn.
Losing weight by strengthening the midsection is also a top priority. It’s not only a perfect routine, but it’s also a straightforward one, very user-friendly, and requires only a little space or no equipment.
