How To Do Hanging Leg Raises

This short article will teach you how to do hanging leg raises because it’s one of the very best “hard” ab exercises you can do. To recap, let’s cover just some of the reasons why this is such a great exercise:

• They strengthen your abs (especially your lower abs!)...
• They decompress your spine…
• They stretch your back…
• They help Correct Lordosis by training you to tilt your pelvis posteriorly and up…

Sounds great right? Let’s get started then! (note: all images in this post of Olympic lifters are property of Dehwang on flickr)

The Answer To “How To Get Lower Abs?“

I get a lot of questions about people wondering how to get their lower abs to show through… what exercises are good for the lower abs, etc

The real answer is you won’t see your lower abs until you get your body fat low enough, but as far as exercises go that work this part of your body well, the hanging leg raise really can’t be beat.

The Strength Athletes Choice!

Another point I’ll make before I get into the specifics of how to do the exercise is that many, many world class athletes use the hanging leg raise in their training… and… not many “regular” people do.

Olympic weightlifters, record-setting powerlifters and legends like Bruce Lee all do/did hanging leg raises and your average gym rat will say “it’s too hard” or “I can’t do high reps for tone” when asked if they do this exercise.

Don’t be like everyone else. Instead, step into the legacy of truly strong men and women who have a rock-solid midsection and start doing this exercise too.

Setting Up The Hanging Leg Raise

You’ll want to hang from a pullup bar, I got the kind you put in your doorway and it works fine. Grab the bar with a pronated (palms facing away from you) grip like the picture below:

Then before you start you don’t just want to hang there, keep the following in mind:

• Thumbless Grip – to work on your grip strength, forget the thumbs. This will also help you get the proper mid/upper back involvement into the exercise when you start doing it.
• Straight elbows - don’t flex your arms, just keep them straight b/c it stresses your shoulders. If you’re having a hard time with this, think of flexing your tricep muscles like when you’re having a hard time keeping your arms straight for deadlifts…
• Shoulders into their sockets – Pavel Tsatsouline talks about pulling your shoulders into your sockets in overhead lifts and this exercise to protect your shoulders, you’ll want to do it too. Think of flexing your arm pits, you’ll notice you move a little closer to the bar if you do it right.

Executing The Hanging Leg Raise

• Stay Tight - keep your shoulders “in their sockets”…
• Breath - breath deep down into your stomach…
• Push the bar down – as if you’re trying to bring it forward a couple inches and down to meet your legs…
• Legs Straight – keep your legs straight and tight together…
• Think SLOW - no jerking or using momentum, be slow, be strong!
• Raise em’ - while pushing down on the bar, raise your legs higher and higher towards the bar…
• Torso Upright – keep your upper body and head as upright as possible…
• Feel it in your lats - if you’re pushing down on the bar enough you’ll feel your lats activated a little bit…
• Touch the bar with your toes - keep going till your toes touch the bar…
• Lower Slowly - and you’ll really feel it, then get ready for another rep…

“What If I Can’t Do A Full Rep?”

You might not be able to do hanging leg raises with completely straight legs at first, that’s ok. You can still do this exercise, but just keep your knees bent and tucked up.

You’ll still follow all the directions above, but you just won’t be touching the bar with your feet — instead you’ll bring your knees up as high as possible and most likely be touching your elbows with them.

This will work the same movement and start building strength. Then what you do is you progress your way towards a full hanging leg raise with straight legs. To make it easy on yourself you start by raising your legs bent then straightening your legs and controlling them as you lower them/slowly letting them down.

If you hadn’t noticed by the article on how to do pullups, this is how you train most exercises that you can’t do a full rep of yet. You make the concentric (the first half of the movement) easy some how and then slowly do the eccentric motion (the lowering or “second half” of the movement) under control the correct way with no assistance. The reason why is because most people are strong enough to do the “negative” parts of exercises correctly and under control, even if they can’t do one full rep of the exercise regularl, and this builds strength through the specific movement pattern. Pretty soon, you’ll be cranking out full reps.

“How Can I Make It Harder?”

First off, if you’re doing these the very first time and you’re doing them slowly and under control, then a standard 5 x 5 scheme after your strength workouts should be pretty challenging. Focus on doing them slowly, and under control with no momentum and it’s pretty challenging.

If that’s still too easy for you (you stud you!) then you could of course add reps to the exercise, and go from there.

There’s also a lot of ways to make it more challenging, you can play with these ideas:

• Knees bent with a weight plate – do it with knees bent, but throw a weight plate in your lap…
• Light dumbbell between your ankles – you could put a really light dumbbell between your ankles and keep your legs straight…
• Touch on the sides – like a windshield wiper, you could touch your toes on either side of your arms before putting them down…
• Pullups in L-Sit - you could do a hanging leg raise, then on the lowering part stop at the point where your legs are 90 degress (the “L-sit” position) and then do a pullup, then lower and repeat…

If you come up with any other cool ways to do this drill then just let me know. It really is challenging and you’ll quickly learn how to do hanging leg raises if you follow the information above.