 The question is from Ella Beasley, what are the best weighted exercises for building abs? We have a guide on training your abs and we talk a lot about weighted exercises and how best to build abs that show. So this is, it's a free guide, it doesn't cost anything. It's at mindpumpfree.com, we'll make sure that we link it. But in terms of this question here, why would anybody first off want to build their abs? This is something that I learned later on again in my training career. I was one of those people that I had to get to seven or eight percent body fat to have a six pack. I just, I don't store body fat on my arms or my legs. They're almost always lean. But if I do, it's right on my abs. And I just, I was not one of those guys that at 10% had a six pack. I had to get lower than that. And even then when I was relaxed, I didn't have, I was always envious of those guys that had abs or girls that had abs that you could see when they were relaxed. You know what I mean? They're just walking around with their shirt off and you can see their abs stick out a little bit. And I was like, man, I wish I had that. And I couldn't figure it out. I was doing high rep exercises and twists and all these crunches and it just wasn't working. Then I realized, why don't I build them? Like if they get a little bigger, they'll stick out more. So that's what I did. I started doing weighted exercises for abs and they stuck out more to the point now where I have a visible six pack around 10 or 11%. So I don't need to get quite as lean to have those abs show. Now the question is, what are the best weighted exercises? By far, one of my favorite is a good old fashioned decline sit-up. Just do a decline sit-up, curl your way up real slow and you'll feel those abs build. And it's because the reps are really low. So. Now to that, I think it's important to talk about the importance of first making sure that you have good mechanics with abs because in fact, I got tagged on the guys over at squat university did a post. And I think the post said something along the lines that crunches were a waste of time. And for most people are either hurting themselves or not doing it correctly. And somebody was like, you know, send it right away. Of course, I get tagged or that stuff sent to me. And I said, well, I haven't read the post. I don't know what he exactly is talking about, but I could make a case for why crunches can be worthless for some people. In fact, when I think about my average client, I would have to say that more than half of them did not do crunches correctly. Most of them were so hip flexor dominant that they were using more of their hip flexors to crunch up or sit up in an exercise. And so if you have really poor mechanics or you struggle with feeling ab exercises in your abs and then you go and load it. You're gonna hurt your back. Yeah, you're gonna end up hurting. And that's what actually what the statement was, was that crunches hurt more people's backs and I think that they help people build abs or something along those lines. And so, you know, and Sal alluded to our free guide, it addresses that talk set in there. We also have great videos on our YouTube channel that we talk about addressing that if you have hip flexor dominance and how to work on that before you do abs. But that's important. It's important that you get really good non-weighted control of your abs and you can feel your abs working because I can make a perfect sit up and fail at like five reps by just going slow and controlled and slowly rolling each vertebrae down as I open up and make that extremely difficult and challenging for five to seven reps before I load it. And I think too, like this is one of those muscle groups that commonly like people lose connection with. And so it's very easy to think that just going through the range of motion that you think is preferable for a crunch or that just like a hanging ab leg raise is gonna start building that back up again, but you don't have that like connection established to where you're actually directing the work to the abs. And so to establish that again is paramount before adding load, much like any other muscle or anything else that you've, you're probably more familiar with like in a curl, if I'm not feeling my bicep get involved, you're probably gonna try and stop and figure that out. So. Yeah, so here's the problem though. People do feel their abs, but they're not working their abs. Their abs are as a stabilizer, but not working them through a full range of motion. In fact, you take the average person, have them stand up straight and just tell them to do pelvic tilts. See if they can do that. See if they can articulate. Right, just bracing. Yeah, just take their pelvis and go from sticking their butt out to tucking their tailbone without, you know, having to use their hips. Just articulate that and they still can't do it. This is super obvious when you see people do leg raises. Watch someone do a leg raise, especially the one where you brace your arms at the bottom and to bring their knees up. And what they're doing is they're just using their hip flexors. So you have to understand what the abs do. The abs, when they contract, they fold you at your lumbar spine, not at your hips. And that's the thing. The average person watches a person fold. They look very similar if you don't know what you're looking for. That's right, they just see someone fold forward and they say, oh, that's an ab. You can fold forward at the hips and not fold forward at the lumbar. So it's really about working through that lumbar, getting the lumbar spine to flex and then extend. That's what the abs do, not at the hips. So once you figure that out, then you can start to add resistance. In fact, most people just doing that will give them all the resistance they need. Oh yeah, I mean, even myself, I openly admit that I probably neglect my ab training more than anything else. We've talked about this before. And so I know when I kick it back up, I mean, my abs are so weak that doing five to seven, like perfect sit-ups is so much load. Just me rolling up the spine and slowly sitting up, I mean, that'll blast my abs within five to seven reps. So it doesn't take much when you do it correctly. Now, if you're somebody who's been training your abs and you've got great control of it and you can do 15, 20 perfect sit-ups, no problem, then okay, well then loading it I think is totally fine and encouraged and a good idea because a lot of people don't do that. And I would agree with Sal with what exercise I would start with.