Scissor Kicks: Correct Form, Advantages, & Muscles Worked

Everyone desires to strengthen and tone their core, but more often than not, people only deal with the six-pack abs portion of the training. There’s nothing flawed with awesome brick-like abs, but it surely’s essential to recollect the importance of core training.

And I’m not talking about karate kicks, either.

The core is a dynamic group of muscles that must be trained with quite a lot of exercises to ensure that your body cannot only move while you ask it to but additionally it could ensure that you’re pain-free. Scissor kicks are a incredible option to focus on the often-forgotten transverse abdominis, and the advantages are seriously excellent.

Table of Contents:

• What Are Scissor Kicks?
• Scissor Kicks vs Flutter Kicks: What’s The Difference?
• How To Perform Scissor Kicks
• Muscles Worked During Scissor Kicks
• 6 Advantages of Scissor Kicks
• Common Scissor Kick Mistakes
• Scissor Kicks Alternatives
• Programming Scissors Kicks
• Sample Core Workout
• FAQs

What Are Scissor Kicks?

The scissor kick exercise is an abdominal exercise that mainly targets your transverse abdominis. This corset-like muscle is the deepest of all of the core muscles, stabilizing your spine and pulling your core in.

Unfortunately, the transverse abdominis and transverse abdominis exercises are sometimes neglected in favor of exercises that train the ever-popular six-pack. We’ll go into depth later about why that is a foul idea. To do the scissor kick, start lying in your back and lift your legs off the ground to a 45-ish-degree angle, depending in your fitness level.

While keeping your legs straight, cross one over the opposite like scissors cutting paper within the air without letting them drop all the way down to the bottom. Holding your legs within the air like this also targets lower body muscles just like the hips’ quads and abductors/adductors. 

Scissor Kicks vs Flutter Kicks: What’s The Difference?

For those who aren’t accustomed to the flutter kick, it’s just like the scissor kick. The flutter kick can also be done lying in your back along with your legs off the bottom, but they shall be just off the ground.

Keeping your legs straight, you will flutter your legs as if holding a kickboard within the water and kicking your legs to propel yourself forward. At first glance, these core exercises look almost an identical. They even each goal the transverse abdominis while working the glutes and quads.

Nonetheless, scissor kicks are a bit more advanced. The crisscross motion is more difficult because it recruits the adductors and abductors. That is the best approach to tell these apart: Flutter kicks are an up-and-down movement, and the scissor kick is a crisscross motion. 

How To Perform Scissor Kicks

Scissor kicks are a reasonably basic-looking movement, but there are specific rules it is advisable to follow to get the advantages you’re chasing. This move is a difficult position, and most of the people have a tough time keeping their back from arching or keeping their legs straight.

Be sure that to follow these guidelines when performing scissor kicks to ensure that you’re strengthening and never furthering your imbalances. 

• Lie on the ground with legs prolonged and place your arms at your sides.
• Keep your low back firmly pressed into the ground and interact your core to lift each legs off the bottom until they’re at a 45-degree angle.
• Separate your straight legs right into a “V” shape, which shall be your starting position. 
• While keeping each legs straight, bring your legs together and cross one over the opposite. Widen them back out again into that very same “V” position, and as you bring them in again, bring the other leg on top this time.
• Proceed alternating sides and crisscrossing the legs while keeping your legs straightened and your lower back firmly pressed into the ground. 

To change this exercise and make it easier, either place your hands under your butt, which is able to help keep your lower back on the ground, or lift your legs higher than a 45-degree angle. To advance the exercise, increase your range of motion, decrease the tempo, or add light ankle weights.

Pro Tip: An exercise mat can assist make the move more comfortable and stop you from laying on the gross gym floor.

Muscles Worked During Scissor Kicks

Scissor kicks are surprisingly difficult, engaging many muscles of the core in addition to your leg muscles. Listed below are the first muscles worked during this exercise:

• Transverse Abdominis: The six-pack gets the entire Instagram attention, however the transverse abdominis is the unlikely motion hero of the core muscles. Because the deepest internal core muscle in your body, it protects your organs and supports the critical pelvic and lumbar areas. Situated within the front abdominal wall under your internal oblique, it stretches out of your ribs to your pelvis. That anatomy means it’s called upon with every movement you make. 
• Hip Flexors: This muscle group is often regarded as one muscle, but that’s definitely not the case. The hip flexor muscles are a bundle of muscles that start beneath your stomach and run across your hips before inserting into the highest of your thighs. The first hip flexors include psoas, iliacus, pectineus, rectus femoris, and sartorius. As a consequence of excessive sitting, most individuals have weak and tight hip flexors, commonly resulting in back pain. These muscles must be strong to make sure you may move your lower body how you wish to without getting injured. This implies hip flexor exercises are crucial!
• Rectus Abdominis: The six-pack abs often called the rectus abdominis are a parallel set of muscles that run down the front of your torso. During rectus abdominis exercises, they work to flex your trunk, meaning they will let you sit up off of the ground and assist you bend your upper body forward. Together with flexion, they work to stabilize and help maintain the correct position of your pelvis.
• Lower Abs: It is vital to notice that I placed this right after the rectus abdominis, and I did this because there aren’t, in actual fact, any separate lower abs, only one set of abdominal muscles has an upper and a lower section. The upper section works to flex your torso, and the lower section is more geared toward hip flexion. You can not isolate the lower abs, but an exercise like this helps to focus on them more as you bring your thighs toward your core throughout the scissor kick. 
• Adductors: Without going too in-depth, the adductors are a bunch of muscles near your inner thighs that work to bring your legs into the midline of your body. The adductor brevis, adductor longus, adductor magnus, gracilis, and pectineus play their part on this movement.
• Abductors: Where the adductors bring the legs toward the body’s midline, abductors take them away from the body. The gluteus medius, gluteus minimus, and TFL (tensor fascia latae) make up this group of muscles. These muscles assist with walking gait, hip extension, and stabilizing the body.

What Are The Best Scissor Kick Exercise Advantages?

With the entire above muscles in play, it’s no surprise the scissor kick comes with many advantages. Listed below are six of the highest advantages you may expect from doing scissor kicks frequently.

• Increase Core Strength: Training the core with scissor kicks hits muscles to your on a regular basis movement and athletic performance. Strengthening these muscles in unison will directly carry over to movements like squats, deadlifts, running, and jumping, to call a number of.
• Decrease Lower Back Pain: It sucks to stand up from a chair feeling stiff and have your lower back hurt. Strengthening with the scissor kick exercise will develop the entire mandatory core muscles that help stabilize your spine and ensure that you may move without pain. The hip flexors are extremely necessary, and strengthening them will decrease that tight, painful feeling you get within the front of your hips and lower back. 
• Tone Abs: With a stronger core comes increased strength for all of your other exercises. Scissor kicks will strengthen and tone your core, however the improved performance in the opposite movements will proceed to tone the world as you progress from week to week. Strengthening your abs to guard your spine needs to be priority primary, after which once they’re strong enough to do this, they may reward you with awesome beach body abs in case your weight loss program is so as.
• Help With On a regular basis Tasks: Strengthening the right muscles helps with on a regular basis movements like walking and standing up from a chair. These could also be an afterthought when our training is spent doing difficult advanced exercises, but when you might have ever had pain while walking or standing up, you recognize it isn’t to be taken as a right.
• Increase Performance: Together with the on a regular basis tasks, strengthening your core will directly carry over to things like running, jumping, and throwing. Any athlete knows how much a robust core affects their performance. Do not forget that this is only one core puzzle piece, but it surely checks many boxes. 
• Fix Imbalances: What’s unique about this exercise is its ability to strengthen the core muscles as a unit. You may have to find a way to contract multiple muscle groups to perform this movement, and it’s technically a unilateral exercise since you’re alternating one leg at a time, moving in unison. If you might have a core muscle imbalance, it would begin to even out after a number of weeks of the scissors exercise.

Common Mistakes To Avoid When Performing The Scissor Kicks Exercise

To get essentially the most out of your scissor kicks, it is advisable to do them with proper form. Avoid these errors to coach the suitable muscles and keep from getting injured:

• Arching your lower back: In case your core muscles aren’t strong enough to have interaction properly, the lower back will attempt to assist and take over the exercise. To avoid this, keep your hands and elbows flat against the bottom, press your lower back into the ground, and pull your stomach toward your spine. If this still is a difficulty, try placing your hands under your butt until you may progress to keeping them at your sides. An alternative choice is raising your legs above a 45-degree angle and lowering them down as you get stronger. 
• Bending legs: Keep your legs straight while performing this exercise to strengthen your quads and hip flexors. Consider flexing your quads and feet, pulling your toes towards your face to assist keep the legs locked. In the event that they keep bending, you may try to finish a number of reps at a time until you get stronger and might do more in a row. 

2 Scissor Kicks Alternatives

Whether you wish to change things up, or simply want much more exercises to hit your core, listed below are two scissor kicks alternatives.

1) Ab Bicycles:

This crunch variation is an amazing approach to work the obliques, hip flexors, rectus abdominis, and transverse abdominis. All of the moving parts could make it difficult to keep up the shape, so ensure that you progress slowly with control before adding speed to the movement. 

Tips on how to do Ab Bikes:

• Lie in your back and convey your legs to a 90-degree angle along with your knees above your hips and feet directly according to your knees.
• Place your fingertips against your temple as a substitute of holding onto the back of your head so you do not pull and crunch your neck forward.
• Elevate your upper body barely so your shoulder blades barely touch the ground.
• Extend your left leg straight and twist your torso as your left elbow crunches towards your right knee. Extend your right leg and crunch your right elbow toward your left knee as your left leg comes back in. 
• Repeat and alternate sides.

2) Flutter Kicks:

Flutter kicks are an amazing place to begin before advancing to scissor kicks as they remove the crisscross portion of the exercise. You may perform them faster to get a cardio-type feel to your core or use a slower tempo to feel a deep burn with the time under tension. 

Tips on how to do Flutter Kicks:

• Lie in your back along with your legs straight and arms at your sides.
• Lift each legs just a number of inches off of the ground while keeping your lower back pressed into the ground. 
• Keeping your legs straight, flutter kick your legs as if kicking in a pool. Your heel of 1 foot needs to be just above the toes of the opposite foot as you turn sides throughout the movement. 

Programming Scissor Kicks

If you might have never performed scissor kicks before, try adding two sets of 20 total crisscross reps into your core training. This could provide you with a baseline for regressing or progressing the exercise.

For those who are more seasoned in core training, try adding 3-4 sets of 30 seconds, going for as many reps as possible.

Core training may be done by itself day or one portion of the core every day along along with your strength training program. Either way, you will want to search out what works for you, and the very best core workout is the one you do. 

Scissor Kick Sample Workout Routine

In search of a great core routine that features the scissor kick? You’ve got come to the suitable place! You may perform this routine by itself and even add it to the tip of your leg workout.

FAQs

Now, let’s answer a few of the more commonly asked questions on scissor kicks.

What’s a scissor kick? 

A scissor kick is a core exercise performed while lying in your back and making a crisscross motion along with your legs like a pair of scissors making cuts. 

Are scissor kicks good for thighs? 

Scissor kicks are a incredible core exercise that also goal the inner and outer thighs. 

Are scissor kicks effective? 

Scissor kicks are very effective because they aim the entire core as a substitute of isolating one part at a time. 

Are you able to get a six-pack from flutter kicks? 

Flutter kicks usually are not likely to offer you a six-pack by themselves, but in the event that they are a part of an all-encompassing core program and a correct weight loss program, they definitely will help. If abs is your goal, ensure that to follow our weight reduction meal plan and a workout split (that features flutter kicks, after all).

Scissor Kicks: Final Thoughts

Scissor kicks construct a incredible foundation for a lot of core muscles and deserve a spot in your training program. Be sure that to follow the correct form, and you may work an extended list of muscles in the method.

Also, do not forget that there are more advantages to scissor kicks than simply getting the abs of your dreams. With more core strength comes more overall strength, which is able to directly carry over to lots of your favorite compound lifts, like squats and deadlifts. 

Long story short, start scissor-kicking!

Able to make your scissor kicks even harder? Pick one in all these 11 Best Resistance Bands and add some resistance to your core routine!