Active Bridge
This exercise focuses on your glutes and also strengthens your hamstrings and
inner thighs.
You’ll need a small playground ball. I picked this one up at Target for just
about a dollar. Who says you need one of those ridiculously expensive (and typically
less effective) health club-level machines.
Lie on your back and place the ball between your knees. Squeezing the ball
activates your inner thigh muscles. Keep in mind that you have five adductors
(inner thigh muscles) each working optimally at a different angle.
Continuously squeezing the ball as you move up and down and change your angle
of hip flexion forces you to recruit all of your adductors (much unlike those
inane seated inner thigh machines at your local health club).
Oops… back to the exercise.
We’ll start on your left (because my pictures say so). Place your left foot
on the floor with your foot along the midline of your body. This, in addition
to the activation of your inner thigh muscles, helps inhibit (at least, somewhat)
your tensor fascia latae, an underrated but often troublesome muscle.
Push through your heel and extend your hip. That means bring your butt off
the floor. The trouble with the way many personal trainers cue this exercise
is that they say, “Lift your butt up.”
Many client, however, will listen to that cue and use whatever they can to
lift their butt up – whether it’s with their quads, low back, or hamstrings
(all bad news).
The focus should be on contracting your glutes and moving at only your hip
joint.
By the way, turn your palms up while you do this exercise. It helps activate
your mid-back muscles (often weak) and tends to keep you from cheating by pushing
your arms into the floor.
Also, keep your hips level at all times. This activates your obliques more.
It’s this type of “anti-rotation” exercise that saves you from low back pain
– far more than any number of ab crunches ever could.
How many reps? Sorry, I don’t know you! Those magazines that dictate how many
reps you should do on a body weight exercise are just making up stuff.
In general, do as many as you can in perfect form. If you can do more than
20 or so smooth, controlled reps, you need a more challenging exercise.
Try this exercise and let me know how you do.
Tags: inner
thigh exercise, butt
exercise, ab exercise,
fitness tip
Tags: fitness program, exercise program
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