Once you get more experienced in ab exercise, you might want to move on beyond the basic exercises to do some more advanced ones. While these exercises are often complicated, they are much more effective for focusing on specific muscles. Be warned, though, that you shouldn’t try them until you know what you’re doing, as you might hurt yourself or others around you.

The first two to try both use an exercise ball. In the first exercise, you lie on your side, and then put the ball between your legs. Then tighten your abs and use your hip muscles to gently lift the ball.

A second exercise to do with the ball is the plank, which is when you do what are basically push-ups, only with your legs balanced on the ball and your arms stretched a long way off the ground.

If you have two people, a good advanced exercise is for one of you to lie on your back and put their legs in the air. Then, the other holds the legs around the ankles, and tries to bend them back towards the head. The idea is for the person lying down to try and force their legs up again against the downward pressure.

If you’ve got a metal bar or something else that you can hang from, you can do hanging ab exercises. Simply hold on to the bar, and then try to raise your legs up as close as you can get them to your chest.

However, whichever exercises you do, you still need to exercise all your ab muscles equally. It’s no good trying to ‘spot reduce’ to get rid of fat on one particular kind of your body – the only way to do it is to get fit all over. So you’d better get started!