Straight legs, dead hang, savage lower abs.
Tilt your pelvis up at the top for the real ab work. Kill any swing on the way down.
The hanging leg raise loads the lower portion of your abs harder than anything done lying on the floor, raising straight legs against gravity from a dead hang. The real work is the pelvic tilt at the top, curling your hips toward your ribs, and the slow lower that fights the swing. It's the bodyweight ab move you graduate to, brutal, scalable, and needing nothing but a bar.
You're dropping your legs instead of lowering them. Control the descent all the way down, brace before the next rep, and if it still turns into a pendulum, bend your knees and shorten the lever until you own it.
Hanging knee raises, same movement with bent knees. Build to 12 to 15 strict reps with a tilt at the top, then start straightening your legs a little more each session.
Raising the legs is hip flexor work, the ab work is the pelvis curling up at the top, as the cue says. Focus on tilting your hips toward your ribs at the finish, that tilt is the actual rep.
