Whether you love or loathe doing the best core workouts, it’s likely you don’t enjoy spending longer than you need to subjecting your abs to the burn. Thankfully, you don’t need to spend hours and hours jumping from planks to sit ups to death by crunches. You can get a solid ab burn in as little as five minutes.
All you’ll need is access to one of the best kettlebells and the readiness to pick up five core strengthening exercises strung together by fitness trainer Jay Maryniak. Sadly, doing one kettlebell workout won’t carve out a set of washboard abs overnight. But, familiarizing yourself with exercises that challenge your core, adding in some resistance and being consistent will help you get you closer to your core strengthening goals.
Ready to do just that? Scoop up your kettlebell and give this five minute routine a go.
What is the 5 minute kettlebell workout?
We weren’t lying when we said this routine only takes five minutes to complete. You’ll be working on each exercise for 50 seconds — for the unilateral moves remember to switch halfway through.
With this in mind, take care when selecting what size of kettlebell to work with in this workout. If you start too heavy, you may find it hard to maintain proper form throughout the whole session.
No matter what weight you opt for, you should take 10 seconds of rest between each move. So be sure to place down the weight by your side for the short interval and allow your muscles a moment to recover before the next exercise.
- Kneeling Wood Choppers
- Plank Saws
- 1/4 Get Ups
- Core Twist + Sit Up
- Hollow Flutter Kicks
Structured as a high-intensity interval training (HIIT) routine, this five-minute kettlebell workout is designed to make strengthening your core as efficient as possible.
The combination of strength and endurance exercises performed in quick succession will help promote muscle hypertrophy and fat loss, which in turn is what contributes to building a leaner and more defined core. Additionally, the brief rest intervals will keep the heart rate elevated, this can help boost your metabolism and contribute to fat-burning efforts.
Thanks to the variety of exercises in Maryniak’s routine, you’ll be targeting multiple muscles within your core, including the abdominal muscles. From rotational movements like kneeling wood choppers to static holds like plank saws, each exercise challenges the core muscles in different ways to help improve definition and build greater levels of strength and stability in the core.
Additionally, incorporating dynamic movements such as 1/4 get-ups and woodchoppers engages not only the core but also other muscle groups, like your arms and shoulders. But if you're looking to torch your upper body muscles, you'll need to include some more exercises specially tailored to this for better results.
On that note, you should strive to incorporate a variety of workouts into your fitness routine anyway. This not only prevents boredom and plateaus but also ensures that different muscle groups are targeted, promoting balanced strength development and reducing the risk of overuse injuries.
Finally, it's crucial to remember that every fitness routine should prioritize rest and nutrition. Rest days allow the body to recover and adapt to the stresses of exercise, prevent burnout and support muscle repair and growth.
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