David Beckham shows off his go-to bodyweight exercise for serious core strength

Despite being well over a decade since David Beckham played on the pitch, the 48-year-old still trains hard, as his physique clearly shows. The footballing legend has always had a pretty toned midsection and, recently, he posted a snippet from his workout sharing the exercise he’s been doing to keep it up.

The video, shared on his Instagram, shows David performing a set of 20 hanging knee raises, an exercise that crushes your abdominal muscles and builds core stability. In the video, David’s trainer can also be heard in the background telling him “knees to chest”, to make sure he doesn’t dodge doing those last few reps properly.

Hanging knee raises are a compound exercise because they fire up more than just your abs and core muscles. Whilst you hang from a pull-up bar, you’re also squeezing your shoulder blades together to help you remain stable during each rep, as well as working your forearms, for increased grip strength, as well as your upper arms. 

It’s a good beginner exercise before moving on to straight leg raises. The key with this exercise, as we can see from David’s video, is to make sure you’re not just simply raising your knees up and down. You want to try and curl your knees up, so the bottom of your bum shows slightly so that it’s your abs driving the movement. When you reach this position, squeeze for a second, before lowering them back down. Forget starting off with 20 like Becks, aim for three sets of 8 to 12 and build up from there.

Fancy more celeb-workout? Why not give this simple exercise a try that Chris Hemsworth does to boost his core strength, J.Lo's 30 minute dumbbell workout or Henry Cavil's Witcher workout.