I Did Hanging Leg Raises Every Workout for 30 Days. Here’s What Happened.

I HAVE A bad workout habit: I constantly skip my abs. I plan to tack sets of core-centric exercises on to the end of my gym sessions, but my impatience wins out. The clock seems to tick louder and my body tires, and too often I make the executive decision to hit the showers instead of finishing out with a hollow hold series.

I tell myself that my abs get enough attention thanks to the heavy compound lifts that anchor my workouts. Bracing to handle more than 300 pounds on my back should be plenty of strain on those muscles, right? Wrong, as MH fitness director Ebenezer Samuel, C.S.C.S. explained in our Abs Redefined package. “That is sort of true,” he outlined in our Don’t List video. “But your core also has other functions that go beyond bracing.” Translation: I’d be better off not skipping out on the more direct ab training that can hone all of the core’s capabilities. As much as the core is more than just a set of mirror muscles, it’s also more than just a means to keep your torso upright under load.

Message received. But I know I’d be much more consistent if I establish my dedicated ab training as a habit rather than holding it over my head as a requirement. So what better way to make it stick than committing to a daily challenge? My plan: Pick out a tough, ab-focused exercise (that wasn’t a bracing movement) and do it every day—whether I was in the gym for a workout or not—for 30 days. The idea was less to transform my midsection over a month and more to build a strong base for my training routine (but if it wound up resulting in a visible six-pack, I wouldn’t be mad, either).

I chose the hanging leg raise for the challenge. The exercise checks a few important boxes: it’s not a bracing movement, for one. It hones spinal flexion—the movement most associated with the six-pack muscles, the rectus abdominis—but unlike other exercises like situps performed on the floor, the hanging position makes it much tougher to be lazy. I’d be able to progress the move over the month period, too, adding elements like eccentric countdowns to the reps to ratchet up the difficulty. Lastly, it doesn’t require any equipment to do, so as long as I could find a stable spot to hang, I’d be able to get my sets done for the day.

How to Do the Hanging Leg Raise

A 30-day challenge would just be an empty commitment if I wasn’t able to do the exercise with good form. Just jumping onto a pullup bar and swinging my legs up and down would be a waste of time. I needed to avoid two key mistakes. First off, I wanted to avoid using too much moment, like an old-school CrossFitter. I also wanted to avoid relying on my hip flexors (a.k.a. not my abs) to drive the movement.

I refreshed my memory (and got some pre-challenge reps in to reinforce my form, too) thanks to our Form Check video.

• Start by grasping the bar tightly, with your palms over the bar instead of holding on with your fingers. Don’t jump up and adjust your hands; if you need, step up from a box to make sure you get a good grip.
• Lift your legs off the floor and pull your shoulders down, squeezing to engage your upper back. Turn the pits of your elbows forward to activate your lats. Squeeze your abs and glutes. Your legs should be slightly in front of your torso.
• Bend your knees slightly, then curl your legs up. Think about showing your butt to someone standing in front of you.
• Lower back down to the starting position.

The 30-Day Hanging Leg Raise Challenge

With those cues in mind, I moved on to the 30 challenge. Here’s how it went.

Week 1

I started my journey with a leg day workout in the gym. To cap off the session, I did the hanging leg raise for three sets of 10 reps. Ideally, this would be how I trained every day: Working through all the exercises in my program with consistent effort, then attacking my core work with the same intensity. And over the next two days, that was exactly how the challenge went. I hit my compound exercises hard, then worked through the hanging leg raise reps to cap the workout. I tried to keep my focus to make the exercise more of a raise, less of a swing—especially in the eccentric portion of the movement, which should be slow and controlled—but I definitely found myself using momentum to get my feet up over my hips. By Day 3, my abs were sore, and I struggled to control my legs on the lowering by the time I was doing my final reps. I squeezed my shoulder blades tightly and redoubled my grip on the bar and finished through the set.

Then came Day 4. This was the first time I didn’t have a strength session on the docket, so I faced my first real wrinkle in the project. I had a busy day working from home, and by 5 pm, I hadn’t done my leg raises. I was texting my sister, who lives about a mile from my apartment. I decided to take a quick run to meet up with her and her friends—and frankly, I forgot that I needed to do my reps. On my run back home, as I was standing on a street corner waiting for the light to turn, I realized I could knock them out by hanging on the crosswalk signal. I jumped up, got into position, and banged out 10 reps.

I took off running once the light turned, only one set done—but there were plenty of other cross streets on my way home to finish my reps. I made it two more blocks, hit another red light, and lifted through another 10 reps. I finished the final set on the crosswalk signal box right in front of my apartment, giving me a whole new appreciation for the spot I’ve stood almost every day for the last five years. I know now if I just expand my mind to the possibilities, I can train almost anywhere.

Week 2

I took that spirit into the next week of workouts. I did my reps hanging from a swing set on a playground in the park during another run on Day 8. When I wasn’t in the gym, I opened up the squat rack in my backyard, just to finish my reps—and I even hung from the fire escape ladder one day when it was raining and I didn’t want to get drenched. I was making it happen, no matter what.

At this point, my abs had acclimated to the workload. They were no longer sore (that period lasted for only a day or two during Week 1), and I was able to control my body better as I performed more reps. I didn’t introduce any major adjustments to the rep scheme, but I focused on controlling my movement every day, rather than just zooming through the motions. This was still difficult to remove all momentum from every single rep—a testament to how difficult the exercise is to do with good form on any day—but I noticed my grip was holding longer, and I was able to keep my body from swinging more easily.

Week 3

I traveled to Boston for the Marathon, so I was out of my typical routine. No problem, I thought to myself. I had gone 17 days straight. Fitting my leg lifts in in a new city might be tough, but I was ready to roll with the punches. I checked into the citizenM Hotel in the Back Bay, just an avenue away from the finish line on Boylston Street. I decided to squeeze in a quick workout before my first event. The problem: the hotel gym had a pair of treadmills, a Peloton bike, a dumbbell rack… and no pullup bar. There wasn’t even a cable tower I could hang on. I did a quick dumbbell circuit, then was determined to at least simulate my leg lifts. So I chose two exercises I thought would hit the same ideas, hollow holds (because the hang position is basically a vertical hollow hold, as Samuel loves to say) and V-ups, for some spinal flexion goodness (spoiler alert: they did not yield the same burn. Guess the hanging work was working.)

I scouted the streets of Boston the next day, hoping I might be able to replicate my crosswalk signal box leg raises. Unfortunately, the boxes here weren’t stable enough for me to get a grip—there was barely enough headspace for me to grasp with one hand, let alone both—so I didn’t try it. Late in the afternoon I went out for a run and stumbled on a solution: a bridge overpass. I paused my run and knocked out all three sets as cars whizzed by on the road next to me. I was far enough off the road that I wasn’t in danger of being hit, but I did wonder what the drivers were thinking when they turned the corner and spotted a man in a cutoff hanging off the bridge.

Unfortunately that was the last set of leg raises I managed for the trip. I had meetings and group runs to attend—but even when I went out solo to find another spot to hang, I came up empty. The area of Boston I was staying in didn’t seem to have playgrounds in its parks, or even trees with sturdy limbs low enough for me to hang from.

For Days 19 to 21, I went without my reps. That sucked—but when I was frustrated, I tried to remember that fitness is about more than just showing up and checking a box. I had stuck with it for the first half of the challenge, then kept up my routine as best as I could when circumstances weren’t ideal. Whether I was attempting to stick to a goal or not, that’s all I could ask of myself.

Week 4

I was determined not to miss another day of the challenge. On Day 23, I did an extremely difficult workout for an MH video and almost threw up my lunch. I took a few minutes to sit and recover, allowing my heart rate to get back to baseline and my gorge to recede back down my throat. I could have called it a day—but before I changed clothes, I walked over to the pullup bar and knocked out my hanging leg raises.

By now, I had piled up a few hundred reps, and I found that I could control my body much better than in the previous weeks. For the final seven days, I introduced a more focused eccentric challenge to the final set. (Really, every hanging leg raise rep should be performed like this, so I can also thank all those previous sets for helping me to get into the place where I should be regardless).

I fought to control the lowering portion of the reps, aiming to take a full three-count to lower my legs to the floor. This was hard, and I found myself strained and sweating, my abs burning, my legs falling to the floor and swinging my body backwards by the final rep.

Final Thoughts

By the time 30 days had come and gone, I had completed almost 900 reps (minus a few for the days I missed while traveling). While there were definitely days I found myself staring at the clock and thinking up excuses to exit early, making the commitment helped me to stay consistent. I haven’t kept the streak intact since I wrapped up the challenge, but I have been much better with my ab training than I was before.

I also noticed a change in my physique. I was following the MH 6-Pack Fast Track program and focused on portion control in my diet throughout the period, so I can’t credit what abs I wound up with strictly to those reps—but having a dedicated focus for the month rather than a loose routine definitely played into the results.

But I was never in this just for looks. Along with the more visible muscle definition, I found that I was stronger when I whipped the weights up in sets of kettlebell snatches, my favorite secondary exercise for the hybrid strength/kickboxing sessions I tackle in my yard on the weekends. And when I took on the Murph, the extra grip and postural work from all the hanging paid off for the weighted pullup reps, always my weakest point in the workout. I’ve skipped out on wearing a weight vest after a few rounds or entirely in the past, using only my bodyweight for the 100 reps. This year, I was able to grip and pull my way through three-quarters of the workout, only scaling back to bodyweight pullups for 25 reps.

You don’t have to make an everyday commitment to result in real change, but having some extra motivation can certainly help. There’s some value to making a plan and sticking to it—especially when the end result is a body that looks and performs better than it did before.