Torture twists, and believe me the name is apt.
Torture twists are easiest to describe with a video:
You can see I’m shaking like crazy, that’s because it’s hard! If you think it looks easy, try it!
The basics are:
- Set a bench up next to a solid bar you can hook your legs under
- Get a metronome and set it at 60 beats per minute (aka 1 beat per second)
- Sit down, hook your legs under the bar, and lean back so your body is straight like a board, or as straight as you can get it
- Tilt from the midriff to your left. Count 3 beats
- During the 4th beat, turn over to your right.
- Count 3 beats. You’ve just completed 1 rep. Repeat steps 4 through 6 until you’ve completed 3 reps.
- You’ve completed 1 set. Take a 2 minute break, then repeat for 3 sets.
- Once you can do a whole workout, add 1 beat to your count. So after you can do 3 beats for 3 sets of 3 reps completely, try to do 4 beats. Once you can do that, do 5, then 6, etc.
If you can do 7 seconds like me, that’d be 7 seconds*6 per set=42 seconds per set, 126 seconds for the whole workout, add 2 2 minute breaks and the whole workout is 6 minutes and 6 seconds. How’s that for 6 minute abs?
Why are they so torturous? A couple of reasons. One, all you can do is lay back and take it. You’re not pushing or pulling, the pain is in your face and you just have to grit your teeth and finish it out. Two, every time you finish the workout, you know the next time will be harder because you’re just going to add 1 second the next time you step up to the plate.
Just for fun, find someone at your gym that “works on their core” a lot and see how many seconds they can do of this.