How to do the Dead Bug

Steps

1. Begin lying on your back with your hands extended above you toward the ceiling.
2. Bring your feet, knees, and hips up to 90 degrees.
3. Exhale hard to bring your ribcage down and flatten your back onto the floor, rotating your pelvis up and squeezing your glutes. Hold this position throughout the movement. This will be your starting position.
4. Initiate the exercise by extending one leg, straightening the knee and hip to bring the leg just above the ground.
5. Maintain the position of your lumbar and pelvis as you perform the movement, as your back is going to want to arch.
6. Stay tight and return the working leg to the starting position.
7. Repeat on the opposite side, alternating until the set is complete.

Tracking it in OneRep

Add the dead bug to a routine and your previous weight and reps sit beside every set, so the decision to add load is made by what is already on the screen rather than by memory. Exercise history and volume trends are one tap away, and logging works offline for the gyms where signal does not reach.

Because OneRep tracks food on the same timeline, a stall on this lift can be read against what you were actually eating that month — which is the difference between a programming problem and an eating one. More on that in tracking progressive overload without a spreadsheet.

Where the instructions come from

The steps above come from free-exercise-db, a public-domain exercise dataset. They are general guidance, not coaching for your body: if a movement hurts, stop and get someone qualified to look at it.