1: How do I get abs like giant ravioli?
Getting visible abdominal muscles or "abs" depends on
reducing the amount of fat covering the abs, and depends on developing the underlying
muscles, for details, read on...
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2: Should I do lots of situps to reduce fat around my middle?
No. Exercising the area from which you want to lose fat is called
"spot reduction". Spot reduction is now believed to be a myth. Research shows
that fat is lost all over your body, not just in the area that you work. Situps are also
bad for your lower back
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3: How do I reduce the fat covering my
middle?
The answer comes in two parts: diet and aerobic exercise.
DIET
This is controversial, but most people agree that eating very
little fat and lots of complex carbs (like rice, pasta and potatoes) helps ensure that you
don't add additional fat. Then you have to work at using the fat you already have stored
which involves...
EXERCISE
Again a bit controversial, but it's widely agreed that regular,
moderate, aerobic exercise 3-4 times per week works best to burn fat that's already
stored.
"Moderate" because intense exercise burns glycogen not
fat, so keep the intensity at about the level where you are beginning to puff a little.
"Aerobic" means (very vaguely) the kind of exercise
that requires you to inhale more. Some suggest that building more muscle through weight
training helps as well, since muscle burns fat just by being there and moving your body
about; so some weight training couldn't hurt and will probably help.
Many misc.fitness people agree that exercise periods of more than
20 minutes work best. But note that the longer you exercise, the more prone you are to
injury since your muscles also begin to weaken. Two things which help prevent injury are:
- A Good Warm-Up
- 5-10 minutes of light exercise to warm your muscles, try to break
a sweat
- Stretching
-
cautious 20-30 sec stretches for every muscle
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4: How do I exercise the abs?
The abs are designed to perform one main task, to shorten the
distance between your sternum, or breastbone, and your pelvis. The only way to do this is
to bend your spine in the lower back region.
In short, any exercise which makes you move your sternum toward
your pelvis or your pelvis toward your sternum is good. To do this safely, the lower back
should be slightly rounded, not arched.
In general when exercising the abs, try to maintain the natural
arch of you lower back. The lower back will round slightly as you perform the exercises.
Don't fret about pressing your back into the ground.
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5: What's wrong with situps?
Traditional situps emphasize sitting up rather than merely
pulling your sternum down to meet your pelvis. The action of the psoas muscles, which run
from the lower back around to the front of the thighs, is to pull the thighs closer to the
torso. This action is the major component in sitting up. Because of this, situps primarily
engage the psoas making them inefficient at exercising your abs. More importantly, they
also grind the vertebrae in your lower back.
They're inefficient because the psoas work best when the legs are
close to straight (as they are when doing situps), so for most of the situp the psoas are
doing most of the work and the abs are just stabilising.
Putting the thighs at a right angle to the torso to begin with
means that the psoas can't pull it any further, so all of the stress is placed on the abs.
Situps also grind vertebrae in your lower back. This is because
to work the abs effectively you are trying to make the lower back round, but tension in
the psoas encourages the lower back move into an exaggerated arch. The result is the
infamous "disc pepper grinder" effect that helps give you chronic lower back
pain in later life.
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6: What are good ab exercises?
We've divided the exercises into upper and lower ab exercises.
Note that there aren't two separate muscles that you can truly isolate, so all the
exercises stress the whole abdominal wall. However there are "clusters" of
muscle separated by connective tissue (these make up the "washboard" or the
"six-pack"). You can focus on the upper clusters by moving just the torso and
the lower clusters by moving the pelvis.
For the lower abs, in increasing order of difficulty:
- lying leg raises
- reverse crunches
- vertical lying leg thrusts
- hanging knee raises
- hanging leg raises
For the upper abs:
- ab crunches
- 1/4 crunches
- cross-knee crunches
-
pulldown crunches
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7: Is there a specific order I should
do exercises in?
According to Legendary Abs, you should exercise the lower abs before the upper abs and do any
twisting upper ab movements before straight upper ab ones. Twisting exercises work the
obliques as well as the upper abs.
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8: How do I structure an ab routine?
According to the guidelines in Legendary
Abs:
- Try to do sets in the 15-30 rep range.
- Follow the ordering rules in Question 7.
- Pick easy exercises to start with and when you can happily do
about 2 sets in a row of an exercise, try harder ones.
- Only rest when you absolutely must, so take a short (10-15sec)
rest between two sets of the same exercise, but none between lower and upper abs.
-
Try to take about 1 second for each rep, except for ab crunches
which you do slower (2 secs/rep) for a better contraction and 1/4 crunches which you
should do fast (2 reps/sec) because you're hardly moving.
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9: How often should I train abs?
Some writers recommend doing abs at every workout. Others
recommend doing them however often you do anything else in other words treating them as
you would any other body part. Health For Life's Legendary
Abs recommends three or four times a week.
Since most people want good abdominal tone more than freaky
abdominal size, it probably makes sense to exercise the abs with lower intensity and more
frequently, rather than with high intensity and less frequently.
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10: Should I do side bends to reduce my love handles?
Nope. Love handles (the pads of fat above the hip bone at the
side of the waist) are fat and only shrink with a low fat diet and general aerobic
exercise (see Question 3). You can't just remove the fat from
that area on its own. Legendary Abs claims that side bends develop the oblique muscles under the fat and
therefore make the fat more prominent, but some people feel that the obliques simply can't
get big enough to be noticeable.
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11: Gee, but shouldn't I balance my abs with my spinal erectors?
Thanks for asking. If you develop your ab strength without
similarly developing your spinal erectors (the muscles that straighten your lower back),
you will end up with strange and possibly damaging posture.
Hyperextensions are a good lower
back exercise. Deadlifts, both straight and bent-legged give the lower back a lot of
exercise, so if you do them you don't need to add anything else. Make sure you get someone
to show you how to do them properly and keep your lower back arched through the whole
movement.
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12: Are there any special abdominal exercises during pregnancy?
The following brief summary of how to modify your routine is from
Colleen Porter.
Modifications for Pregnancy and Postpartum
During pregnancy, abdominal exercises can help preserve muscle
tone and take strain off the lower back. However, you might need to learn new routines,
since most experts have counseled against lying on your back after the fourth month due to
pressure on the vena cava, the blood vessel that returns blood from the lower body to the
heart. The books "Pregnancy and Exercise" by Raul Artal (currently out of print)
and "Essential Exercises for the Childbearing Year" by Elizabeth Noble offer
many suggestions for safely strengthening the abdominals during pregnancy. One exercise is
the Rocking Back Arch: kneel on all fours and count to five as you rock back and forth,
then return to the original position and arch your back. Repeat five times, several times
a day.
Postpartum moms should check their abdominal muscles for
separation before starting any abdominal exercise program, because damage can be
exacerbated by exercise if there is separation. Test this by pressing your fingers into
the area by your belly button as you attempt to do an abdominal crunch. If you can put
more than one or two fingers in between the muscles, they have separated and you will need
to modify your crunches. Place your feet the same way, but cross your arms across the
abdomen and squeezing the muscles together as you exhale and contract the abdominals,
lifting only your head (not the shoulders). You may also use a length of material (such as
old sheeting) wrapped around the abdomen and pulled across to achieve the same effect.
The following ab training tip for pregnant women comes from Robin
Burton:
Belly Dancing
"My midwife cautioned against crunches after the belly rose
above the pubic bone, saying that the stress this caused was a factor in abdominal
separation. I found that an excellent way of exercising the abdominals during pregnancy
was belly dancing! The dancing strengthens the muscles of the abdomen with very little
strain and the movements help during labor, too. Of course it isn't going to give anybody
a washboard stomach, but no pregnant woman is going to have one of those anyway!"
13: Does the XXX ab machine/gadget work?
There are several types of abdominal machine provided in gyms and
many more plastic varieties available in stores and via mail order. These things mostly
are not much better than doing the ab exercises listed here, many of them are
significantly worse.
The more complex ones that you find in gyms have the advantage of
progressive resistance, but you can achieve very similar effects by simply holding weight
plates during crunches.
To evaluate whether a machine is worth using should be reasonably
simple - if it encourages an ab contraction under a load it's good, if not don't bother.
An ab contraction (as explained in Question 4) is when the
sternum is pulled toward the pubic bone or vice versa as the main action.
The fundamental thing is to have good form in ab exercises, no
machine can force that. If you have the form, machines are not greatly useful.
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