Sat. Dec 21st, 2024

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This 12-time Olympic medalist reveals her ultimate 6.5-minute ab workout that helps keep her fit

Five-time Olympic swimmer and 12-time Olympic medalist Dara Torres demonstrates her ultimate ab workout that keeps her in amazing shape. Torres has teamed up with SHOW MORE OF YOU from Celgene and Otezla — a campaign that is shining light on the psoriasis or psoriatic arthritis.

To learn more about psoriatic disease, visit the campaign’s website. Following is a transcript of the video.

I’m going to show you guys some ab exercises that are very simple to do. You can do these very easily at home. Don’t need any equipment.

What you want to do is you want to lay down. You want to put your hands underneath your glutes, okay? And you can do them with your head down, but I like to do them with a crunch up because it gives you a little more difficulty in the exercise.

All you are going to do is going to lift your feet up about 6 inches off the floor. You’re going to start your stopwatch, and you’re going to start doing flutter kicks like this.

This is easy if you’re a swimmer, I guess. But what you want to do, especially if you haven’t ever done these before, is you want to start in, maybe 15 second increments. For me, I do 30 to 45 seconds at a time. So, these are called flutter kicks. Then what we’re going to do is leg lifts.

You go right into it. There’s no break. If you need a break, you can take a break, but I don’t like to take a break. So, you’re still crunching up. You’re doing little tiny leg lifts okay?

Then the next exercise are scissors. Just cross one leg over the other. Again, you’re only about 6 inches off the ground. You don’t want to go too high because then you’re not engaging your abs. You want to keep your feet down about 6 inches off the ground.

So, now you’re doing scissor kicks. Then we have the sways from side to side. This still works your lower abs but also gets a little bit of your obliques. And the other one I like to do is circles. You do one circle to the right and one circle over to the left, and just keep doing these.

Again, I do these in 30 second increments, but if you’re just starting out, just try 15 seconds. And the last one are these circles where you put your feet in and then you circle out, and then circle in and then circle out. So, that’s a great way to work your lower abs.

Being a woman and being 50 years old I really like to work the lower part of my obliques.

The next exercise I’m going to do is call the plank, and they’re very simple in the sense that again, you don’t need exercise equipment.

All you are going to do is you’re going to get on your elbows and make sure your toes are facing the ground. You want your feet about hip width apart. And all you are going to do is make sure your hands are facing each other, just lift your body up.

You want to make sure that you have a nice flat position with just a little bit of lift in your pelvic area. If you’ve never done these before, start off with not a lot of time and then work your way up.

I do these for about 2 minutes. One way to make it a little challenging is to do rocking back and forth on your toes. Just make sure you always finish back where your shoulders are underneath your elbows, like that. Then you can also do little tucks. And just tuck, and maybe do 20 tucks, like that. And that’ll put more resistance on your abs.

Okay, one other thing I like to do… of course you see I’m not stopping, but you guys can take some breaks. I like to do hip rolls on the plank. So, all you’re doing is rolling one hip and coming around and rolling the other hip.

You try to touch the ground. This will really really get you those six pack abs because you’re working your obliques, alright? And the last exercise I like to do — it’s still called a plank, it’s a side plank. Just lift yourself up.

Again, I’m going to put my leg over here because my right knee is bad. You want to make sure that you’re not too far over or too far forward or you’ll fall down. And you can stay like this, which is a very difficult exercise, or if you really want to make it more of a challenge for your obliques, you do dips — Just so your hip just grazes the ground and then back up again.

So, just dip and up. You can do a number of them like maybe 10, or I like to do them for 45 seconds on each side maybe 3 times. And there are some ab exercises for you that are very easy to do at home.