Kenny Carrington: Hi! I am Kenny Carrington, I am the Director here at Velocity Sports Performance in Alexandria. Here we are training with the Pro Donna The Animal Wilkinson. In this segment we are going to work on core strength.

This first exercise we are going to do is what we call glute-ham exercises, glute-ham crunches.

What she is going to do show you three different ways of doing it. First one is she has arms across the body, legs are supported in, sitting up on top of pad, she is just going to come straight back, only to parallel and they come up. Nice slow and controlled.

Your abs just like we talked about the back muscles are small endurance muscles, so we want to be able to stabilize. Any core exercises shouldnt be done really all that quickly. Things we are trying to make sure is that she is not pulling from her legs, she is pulling from the abs to come up. Do anywhere between 10-20 reps depending on the resistance.

For this first one we are going to do 20.

This is the lower level, little less resistance; there are other ways of changing. You can change with the arms behind your head at the same time too without resistance.

We are going to take one next step, we have a medicine ball. We are going to take the medicine ball and hold it in the same place where she just had her arms. So, it is adding some, this is a three kilogram ball adding some resistance.

This time we are going to do ten reps. Its very important, now you make sure that when you come down, you are coming down controlled using the abs to come down not using your back to come down, and to see what she would do is look from the side and make sure that the back is not arching, make sure the back is staying flat the whole time. Now, its ten times.

So, we will give a little rest time. The third one is holding the medicine ball behind the head. It is a little bit more advance.

Still doing ten reps, there you go, and if you find that one situation is a little bit too easy, but the next one is a little bit too advanced, what you can do is change it by not going down as far.

So, next core exercise is, we are going to work on rotational power. Still on the Glute-Ham machine what we are going to do is we call Russian Twist. Still legs are straight, feet are locked into position, still sitting on top of the pad, she is going to lean back to a comfortable probably around 45 degrees and she is going to rotate to the side of where the handles are. Make sure you are rotating from the shoulders, not just bringing the arms across the body. To change intensity what she will do is just change the resistance in the hand. Right now we have the three kilogram medicine ball, you can add a five kilogram medicine ball, or you can hold weights in your hand at the same time.

For this we are going to do 20 each side, working the internal external obliques, we are also working the transverse abdominus, by stabilizer, holding yourself in that 45 degree position. That concludes our rotational core.