How to Do a Perfect Side Plank | Abs Workout

So I'm going to demonstrate how to do a side plank. So there are a couple ways you can do a side plank. I'm going to start with the basic, I wouldn't say regression but, this is good for beginners. Number one your elbow has to be completely under your shoulder. You want to make sure your alignment is always intact.

Your elbow should be right under your shoulder. Okay you're keeping your arms flat like this, your hand flat like this. Now, for a beginner you can keep your knees on the ground, you can stack your legs like so and you're going to lift from your hips. You can either keep your hand on your hip like this, or you can raise your arm up to the sky. Now, this can be challenging for a lot of people, this alone. You want to make sure you squeezing from your glutes. You want to make sure that hips are going up to the sky as much as you can, as if somebody had a string around your hips and they were pulling you up. Now, you're going to hold this for 30 seconds or one minute. If you find that to be too easy you can go into a normal side plank. Couple of ways you can do this.

Again, your shoulder under your elbow or your elbow under your shoulder, feet stacked and you can lift from here, your hand can stay on your hip or you can put your arm up like that. Again, you want to make sure that your hips are going up to the sky you're very active in this. I don't want to see you down here like this. Your hips should be up the whole time your squeezing your glutes. If you want you can also do it as you would in yoga on your hand.

This is just more shoulder and leaning on your forearm is more core. Now, an even more harder version, more difficult version would be to go back to your forearms come up, you can do variations with your arms to make this more challenging. So you could reach underneath you, come back up, reach underneath you, come back up let's stay for ten reps. You can come up and down with your hips or you could do something called a starfish side plank, and hold that guy. And, that's how you do a side plank.