If there’s one thing we love about abs training, it’s that targeted abs workout should be short. That’s especially welcome when a routine is as intense as this one from Sweat app founder and trainer Kayla Itsines.
It’s made up of five bodyweight exercises and should only take 10 minutes, depending on how many rounds you choose to do. It’s a great circuit to add on to the end of a longer weights workout. As well as working your abs and obliques, you’ll raise your heart rate and keep it high, helping to burn fat too.
Take a look at Itsines’s Instagram post where she demonstrates each of the movements.
If any of the movements are unfamiliar to you, Coach has form guides for every exercise and useful form tips too. For instance, certified personal trainer Cara D’Orazio advised that when performing the bicycle crunch, “you want to keep your chin slightly off your chest and your elbows should be going across, so when my right knee is up, my left elbow is going across me to the side. That way it gets into the full oblique.”
One other essential tip from our guide to how to do the burpee is to ensure you’ve warmed up because, according to trainer Dan Baldwin, “the burpee can put a lot of stress through your ankles, knees and wrists.” If you use Itsines’s routine as a finisher you will be warmed up already, but if you’re planning on doing it as a standalone 10-minute workout, add in some warm-up exercises first and make sure you gradually raise your heart rate before getting stuck in.
Dig into our form guides for mountain climbers, walking planks (what Coach calls commandos) and the inchworm (Coach’s name for caterpillar walks) for how to do the other exercises.
For more short abs routines, try this fitness model’s 10-minute abs workout, this eight-minute abs workout, this seven-minute abs workout or five-minute abs workout. Just don’t make the mistake of thinking the workouts get easier as they get shorter.
