I put the "What we need to know from you" stuff in the about me section of my profile.
I'm a thin dude who has been working out for a little over a year and I'm trying to make this PPL program happen. I have to work up to it though because right now I'm only working out 3 days a week and my body would die if I just jumped into 6 days a week. Plus I haven't done some of these exercises before. To ease the transition, I'm incorporating some of the PPL exercises into my current routine. Enter the star crunch and glute bridge.
I'm having trouble keeping my stomach flat/cinched during these exercises. I'm baselining this from how my stomach looks when I just stand up straight and flex my core. My understanding is that when doing exercises that engage your core, you want to keep everything as tight as possible. But when I do these exercises, I feel like thats just not happening. I have a harder time with this during the glute bridge than I do with the star crunch. When I did the glute bridge the other day, it looked like I was pregnant for some of my reps lol.
My guess is that something is just really weak in my core. I have been working out for a little over a year and didn't completely ignore my core over this time. For example I do 1) machine trunk rotations for 5 sets, 15 reps each side with the last 2 sets being the entire rack (190 lbs). 2) 5 sets of 15 rep crunches with the crunch machine at 100 lbs. 3) A bunch of knee raises at the captain's chair. I know none of this is impressive or anything like that, but I didn't expect to have such a hard time keeping my stomach flat during a star crunch/glute bridge, given that I can do the entire rack on machine trunk rotations.
So thats it. I'd appreciate any advice on how to attack this problem.
Thanks!