How to Do Hanging Leg Raises: Muscles Worked, Form, and Progressions

Quick answer: To do a hanging leg raise, hang from a pull-up bar with straight arms, brace, and lift your legs by curling your pelvis up towards your ribs rather than just swinging your feet. Lower over two to three seconds without swaying. It trains the rectus abdominis, obliques and hip flexors. Start with bent knees.

Most hanging leg raises are really hip flexor swings.

The legs go up, the pelvis never moves, and the momentum from the last rep does half the work of the next one. The abs get a light job and the set gets written down as "abs: done". Fixing it takes one change at the pelvis and a clear path from knee raises to straight legs.

What muscles does the hanging leg raise work?

The rectus abdominis, working hard. In a study by McGill and colleagues in the Journal of Sports Sciences, 14 men performed the hanging straight leg raise, the body saw and a walkout from a push-up. The hanging straight leg raise produced the highest challenge to the abdominal wall of the three, above 130 percent of maximal voluntary contraction in the rectus abdominis and 88 percent in the external oblique.

The obliques, more than on a crunch. Escamilla and colleagues in Physical Therapy measured muscle activity in 21 adults across a range of ab exercises. The hanging knee-up with straps was among the highest for upper and lower rectus abdominis and internal oblique activity, and it shared the top spot for the external oblique with the Power Wheel, a rolling ab device.

The hip flexors do the lifting. Your iliopsoas and rectus femoris raise the thighs. The abs tilt the pelvis and hold the trunk still while they do it. That split is why form decides which muscles get the work.

Your grip and lats hold you up. The same Escamilla study found high latissimus dorsi activity on the hanging knee-up, which makes sense when your whole bodyweight hangs off your hands for the entire set.

If you are wondering whether the leg raise hits the "lower abs", our guide to how to train abs covers the ultrasound work on rectus abdominis segments and how the hanging raise fits into a full ab routine.

How do you do a hanging leg raise with good form?

Setup takes a few seconds. What your pelvis does decides how much of the set your abs actually do.

1. Grab the bar at shoulder width. An overhand grip is standard. Hang with straight arms and pull your shoulders slightly down, away from your ears, so you are not dangling loose on your joints.
2. Kill the swing before rep one. Let your body go still, squeeze your glutes lightly and brace your abs. If you start swinging, every rep after that will borrow momentum.
3. Lift by curling the pelvis. Bring your knees or legs up and, as they pass hip height, roll your pelvis up so your tailbone tucks towards the bar. Think of bringing your hips to your ribs, not just your feet to the ceiling.
4. Pause at the top for one second. For straight legs, aim for at least parallel to the floor. Higher is fine as long as your pelvis keeps curling.
5. Lower for two to three seconds. Uncurl the pelvis first, then let the legs come down under control. Stop just before your body starts to sway backwards.

The pelvis cue has some evidence behind it. Workman and colleagues in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research tested a lying double straight leg lift in 16 men. With the pelvis tilted backwards, upper and lower rectus abdominis activity was significantly higher than with it tilted forwards. Rectus femoris activity did not change across positions. That was a lying test, not a hanging one, but it points the same way.

What are the most common hanging leg raise mistakes?

Swinging. The biggest one. If your body sways back and forth between reps, momentum is lifting your legs. Pause at the bottom until you are still.

Lifting the legs without moving the pelvis. Straight legs rising to 90 degrees with a flat, unmoving pelvis is almost all hip flexor. The abs only take over once the pelvis rolls.

Dropping the legs. Letting gravity take the lowering half throws away the slow eccentric and sets up the next swing.

Going straight-legged too soon. A long lever that you cannot control turns into a kick. Stay with bent knees until you can do clean, slow sets of 12 or more.

Letting grip end the set. If your hands give out before your abs do, the set is measuring forearms. Use straps or elbow slings, or build hang time separately.

How do you progress from knee raises to toes to bar?

Change the lever before you add weight. Every step below makes the same movement harder by moving the load further from your hips.

• Captain's chair knee raise. Your forearms rest on pads and your back sits against a backrest, which removes grip and swing. A good place to learn the pelvic curl.
• Hanging knee raise. Same movement from a bar. Bring your knees to your chest and curl the pelvis at the top.
• Hanging leg raise, bent to straight. Straight legs to parallel, or keep a slight knee bend while you build range.
• Hanging straight leg raise to the bar. Legs past parallel with the pelvis still curling. This is the version McGill and colleagues measured.
• Strict toes to bar. Feet touch the bar with no kip. It adds a lats and shoulder demand on top of the ab work.
• Weighted leg raise. A light dumbbell held between the feet or ankle weights, once 12 or more strict straight-leg reps are easy.

Toes to bar in CrossFit is often done with a kip, which is a different skill. For ab training, keep it strict.

How many sets and reps should you do?

Two to four sets of 8 to 15 reps, two or three times a week. Pick the hardest variation you can do cleanly in that range. If you can do 20 easy knee raises, you are ready for the next step.

Add reps, then change the lever. Work up to three clean sets of 12 to 15 on one variation. Then move to the next harder version and start again at 8. A three second lowering or a one second pause at the top raises the difficulty without changing the variation.

Mind your spine load if your back is sensitive. The McGill study estimated about 3,000 newtons of spine compression for the hanging straight leg raise against under 2,500 for the body saw. If your lower back is touchy, bent knees or a different exercise may suit you better.

What are the best hanging leg raise alternatives?

Captain's chair raises give you the same hip flexion and pelvic curl without the grip demand.

Reverse crunches, flat or on an incline bench, train the same pelvis-to-ribs action lying down. In the Escamilla study, the reverse crunch inclined 30 degrees ranked alongside the hanging knee-up for rectus abdominis activity.

Ab wheel rollouts load the abs in a stretched position. The Power Wheel roll-out, a close cousin, was also near the top of the Escamilla rankings.

Cable crunches train the rectus abdominis from the other end, ribs towards hips, and are easy to load in small steps.

How should you log hanging leg raises?

"Hanging leg raise 3x10" tells you almost nothing next month. Was it knees or straight legs? Strict or swinging? Did you use straps?

A hanging leg raise entry needs the variation, the reps per set, any added weight, and the aids you used. The variation is the part that matters most. Moving from knee raises to straight legs is real progress, even when the rep count drops. Our guide to tracking bodyweight exercises covers the same problem for pull-ups and dips.

A four-week starting plan

1. Week one: find your level. Try knee raises, then straight legs. Pick the hardest version you can do for 8 strict reps with no swing, and do three sets of it. Write down the variation.
2. Week two: fix the pelvis. Same variation, same reps, with a one second pause at the top and a clear pelvic curl on every rep. Expect it to feel harder.
3. Week three: slow the lowering. Three second negatives on every rep. Push each set to about two reps short of failure and note where it landed.
4. Week four: add reps or move up. If you hit three sets of 12 cleanly, step to the next variation and drop back to 8 reps. If not, repeat week three.

If grip keeps ending your sets, the hang work in our pull-up guide builds it quickly.

Where Gym Note Plus fits

If you already jot sets into your notes app, keep doing it. The trick is writing the variation next to the reps.

Gym Note Plus reads plain text the way you already type it and turns it into tracked sets.

• Type hanging leg raise straight 12,10,9 and it becomes structured, charted sets.
• Knee raises, straight-leg raises and toes to bar stay separate because you typed different names.
• Bodyweight reps and added weight live in the same log as your loaded lifts.
• Old notes import, so the ab work you already wrote down still counts.

Paste a recent session into the free notes to workout translator to see what your shorthand becomes.

A hanging leg raise with no pelvic curl is a hip flexor exercise, and one with no written variation is a guess.

Frequently Asked Questions

What muscles do hanging leg raises work?

Hanging leg raises train the rectus abdominis, the internal and external obliques, and the hip flexors, with the lats and forearms working to hold you on the bar. In a McGill study, the hanging straight leg raise exceeded 130 percent of maximal voluntary contraction in the rectus abdominis.

Are hanging leg raises better than crunches?

Hanging leg raises and crunches train the same muscle from opposite ends. The leg raise brings the pelvis up towards the ribs and demands more oblique and hip flexor work, while the crunch brings the ribs down and is easier to load. Most lifters benefit from one of each.

Why do I feel hanging leg raises in my hip flexors?

You feel hanging leg raises in your hip flexors because they lift the legs on every rep. If you only feel them there, your pelvis is probably staying flat. Curl your tailbone towards the bar as your legs rise, slow the lowering, and drop to bent knees if you cannot hold that position.

Should beginners do hanging knee raises or leg raises first?

Beginners should start with hanging knee raises or captain's chair knee raises. Bent knees shorten the lever, so you can learn the pelvic curl without swinging. Move to straight-leg hanging leg raises once you can do three strict sets of 12 knee raises with a controlled lowering.

How many hanging leg raises should I do?

Two to four sets of 8 to 15 strict hanging leg raises, two or three times a week, suits most lifters. Choose the hardest variation you can control in that range. Once three sets of 12 feel easy, move to a longer lever or add a light dumbbell between your feet.

Final Takeaways

• Curl the pelvis, do not just lift the legs. Rolling your hips towards your ribs is what turns a hip flexor swing into ab work.
• The hanging straight leg raise works the abs very hard. It topped 130 percent of maximal contraction in the rectus abdominis in McGill's study, the highest of the three exercises tested.
• Progress the lever first. Knee raise, straight leg, toes to bar, then added weight.
• Kill the swing and slow the lowering. Momentum is the most common way to make the set easier without noticing.
• Log the variation with the reps, or moving from knees to straight legs will look like going backwards.