What's up, guys?
Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX.com.
Today we’re talking all about the abs, and I’m going to show you – in what I think
is the most definitive video – how you’re going to get yours to pop, and the best tips
that you can apply to your ab training to make sure you’re getting them to show.
Now, let me start off with a couple of things.
When we talk about abs we’re not just talking about the abs alone.
I think you’re probably meaning everything in this region here, and that’s a whole
hell of a lot more muscles than just the abdominals.
I want to show you how to hit all of these things, and of course, we’re breaking out
the muscle markers to help us do that.
One up front caveat that I know we need to talk about because some people always come
around these videos looking for that shortcut.
I’m going to tell you right here, to your face; there is no shortcut when it comes to
having your abs show if you refuse to watch what you’re putting into your mouth.
Your diet is going to dictate how well your abs show every, single time.
No matter how much cardio you do you’re never going to outrun a bad diet.
So, if your diet is in check, then you can start to see all the rewards of watching all
these muscles come into play, and into focus as you start to work them the way I’m going
to show you, okay?
I want to make sure I cover that.
Now, let’s take a look at the anatomy, since we’ve started talking about it.
When we look at the core we have the rectus abdominus here, which is broken up into however
many packs.
That damn Jesse has an 8.
I seem to have 6.
One, two, three, four, five six.
Now, the linea alba is the line that runs right down the middle and sutures across here,
which is going to compartmentalize the abs into those regions.
I’m going to show you how you can actually use that to your advantage in the future to
get these abs to pop a little more.
We’re going to cover that in a little bit.
But besides the rectus abdominus, this muscle runs this way.
The fibers of this muscle run up and down.
That means through flexion and extension – keep in mind ‘extension’, because we’re going
to hit that, too – through flexion and extension, we contract that muscle.
But because we can actually flex the pelvis from the bottom up we know we can hit the
lower abs because the fibers are preferentially hit differently by having the lower portion
of the pelvis move from on the top.
Versus the top moving down on the bottom.
We can preferentially hit these two areas slightly differently, depending upon the exercises
we choose.
We have the upper region and the lower.
From the side here, we have the obliques – as I contract – that run all the way down here
at this oblique angle.
They feed all the way down, and in.
We don’t just have the visible external obliques here, but we also have the internal
obliques that run up at this opposite angle.
So, they run this way, and the external obliques run at this angle.
Now, you don’t want to forget the all-important serratus, which is the muscle that runs up
through here.
They help us push our arm away from our body.
But – here’s a bit word for you, guys – they interdigitate.
Meaning, they intertwine here with the external obliques to complete that look.
So, when they’re both working together, as you can see here, they’re going to help
to carve out that mid-section completely.
So, you don’t want to ignore those.
Of course, we finally have the transverse abdominus, which runs across this way.
Basically, like your own inner weight belt.
When it closes down, and cinches down, and contracts it provides support all the way
around the midsection, all the way through to the back of the spine.
So how are we going to hit these areas now, but make sure we’re covering all the anatomy,
but getting them each with an exercise that’s going to do the best job?
Well, it takes breaking them down one by one.
If we look at the first region here, the lower ab region, we’re going to look for exercises
like this that initiate the movement with the bottom moving on a fixed top.
Basically, curling the pelvis up, toward you.
That can happen in any of the floor exercises, in the hanging ab exercises that you’re
seeing here.
The fact is, the pelvis is coming up toward the top, initiating the contraction from the
bottom up, and therefore, slightly favoring those lower ab fibers.
Now, we can take that from there and apply the same concept to hitting the upper abs.
That means we want to take any exercise that allows us to initiate the movement from the
top down.
Maybe the legs stay stationary, but the top, and our shoulders are coming off the floor,
creating that spinal flexion down toward the pelvis.
The next thing we want to do is, if we’re going to hit the obliques – again, guys,
I always talk about following the fibers.
We know that obliques run at these acute, diagonal angles here.
If we realize that, we need to know that rotation is going to help us accomplish that.
It doesn’t just have to be rotation this way.
I could stay fixed here and rotate from the bottom.
Therefore, we have top down rotation, which is rotating on a fixed lower half, or I have
bottom-up rotation, which is rotating on a fixed upper half.
There are a lot of different ab exercises that allow us to do this.
The key is, you want to make sure you’re using these exercises to effectively target
the obliques specifically.
Now, know again – as I mentioned in the beginning – the serratus is a muscle that
doesn’t seem to get that much love.
Exercises like this one here in particular are perfect at it.
This is done on a physio ball for a little extra stability challenge.
We’re just going to have our arms on the ball, and once we get in that stable plank
we try to push our arms straight through the ball, allowing our back to rise up toward
the ceiling even more.
Again, it doesn’t just have to end there.
Maybe you don’t have a physio ball.
We’ve talked about doing it on a captain’s chair, which could easily be the corner of
a kitchen countertop.
You just get your body in there and push your body away, and lift away, so the serratus
is actually doing its job.
Another option for you here.
Finally, the transverse abdominus tends to have its own set of exercises, or at least
technique, that allows us to hit that area because you have to be really conscious of
keeping your belly pulled in and flattened.
I’ll get to this in a second with some exercises because we specifically talk about the breathing
being one of the main factors for controlling how well you’re able to perform this.
As far as a sequence here, an overall ‘how would you stack these exercises together?’,
here’s a general rule of thumb.
Because we’re moving the legs in all those lower, bottom-up movements we realize that
they become pretty damn hard because of the weight of the legs that we have to move.
That instantly makes them the most difficult choices in all our ab training arsenal.
We want to make sure we’re doing those bottom-up and bottom-up rotation exercises early on
in whatever ab workout you’re doing, when you have the most strength.
It continues to move up realizing that the rotational movements of just the obliques
are going to become a little more challenging because rotation is something a lot of don’t
train often enough.
And those tend to be a little bit weaker.
Again, we tend to do this in combination with some spinal flexion, so it makes it a little
more difficult than the same, straight, top-down movements, which usually come later.
The mid-range and the top-down movements with our lower body fixed, moving like a classic
crunch would actually be a very easy ab exercise.
But done later in the workout when you’ve already fatigued it becomes something is still
challenging for you.
The idea is, you move from the bottom-up, stick rotation in the middle there, and you
finish it out by doing your specialty exercises for your serratus, and again for the transverse
abdominus.
Now that you know the anatomy and the exercises that hit those different areas, and a bit
about the sequencing of how you want to structure your ab workouts, I have three incredible
tips here that are going to make all of your ab workouts more effective.
It starts with one of the simplest things, guys.
We do it every, single time we do our ab exercises.
It’s our breathing.
But it’s incredibly important.
Here’s why: a lot of guys screw this up.
When it comes to your breathing options in life, in general, you can either do two things.
Actually, I’ll give you three.
One: you can breathe in, you can breathe out, or you can hold your breath.
Now, we know that it’s not advisable to be holding your breath through any of your
exercises.
You want to do one or the other.
But what we do is, we want to breathe out on the exertion of the exercise.
Meaning, whatever exercise you’re doing, when you’re exerting yourself, or coming
up – a classic example would be the crunch.
As I come into the crunch, that’s the hard part.
I want to breathe out every time.
Hanging leg raise.
Anytime I’m moving and doing the movement; that’s when I want to be breathing out.
But here’s the key difference.
You have two opportunities for the abdomen, and what it’s doing.
You can either be pushing out like that, or you can be cinching in, which would be tightening
it down like that.
That’s where that transverse abdominus that I referred to in the beginning of the video
comes in.
The transverse helps to contract, again, in this way like a weight belt to keep this down.
What you want to do is make sure that as you’re breathing out you’re cinching in.
Down.
You don’t want to breathe out and push out at the same time.
What you’re doing is, you’re actually weakening your abdominal wall and doing exactly
opposite what it is you’re trying to do this entire video.
You’re making yourself have a more bloated appearance and weakened abdominal appearance.
So, with every exercise you do, remember to breathe out on the exertion and cinch down
at the same time, and you’ll have a much better looking set of abs.
Now, we can take that a step further by looking at something else we happen to do wrong.
That is, the lack of extension and full range of motion on ab training.
Guys, what happens all the time – if you train on the floor exclusively, or if you
train on a bar, or let’s say you train on a bench and do a decline ab exercise.
The bench, the floor, even hanging here is limiting your body’s ability to extend.
If we know that the true function of the abs is to move from an extended position here,
where they’re stretched, into a flexed spine where they’re now contracted; where is the
extension on all those other exercises?
You’re literally stopping yourself on the floor.
You’re stopping yourself on the bench.
A lot of times when guys get up here they never get themselves into an extended position
here.
They just stay right in the middle.
Well, what happens from that is you’re literally doing the equivalent of taking a tricep pushdown,
starting here, and finishing here.
You’re going from a contracted position to a less contracted position.
You’re never getting into a full stretch on the triceps.
We want to make sure we do that with our ab training.
So, make sure when you’re doing your floor work that you at least include some exercises
that allow you to slide a towel underneath your low back to get yourself into more of
an extended state.
Even when you’re doing your hanging ab exercises here, make sure when your legs come down you
allow your body to extend and get a stretch on the abs before you initiate the next contraction.
The key is: don’t overlook the fact that the abdominal muscles themselves still have
full range of motion and you want to make sure you’re including it.
Finally, a lot of guys will ask me “Jeff, I can actually see my abs, but I don’t have
a lot of depth.
There’s no real, deep cuts.
What do you do to get your abs to pop more?”
That is actually just a factor of probably omitting weighted ab exercises and powerful
ab exercises from your training.
What I mean by that is, we’ve talked about it at the beginning of this video.
The linea alba being one of the key features of the abdominal muscles, including how they
separate, and divide the compartments into that 4-pack, 6-pack, or 8-pack.
You cannot change the structure of that.
You cannot change its ability to either allow you to have a 4-pack, or 6-pack or an 8-pack.
You have what you have.
But what you can do is hypertrophy those abdominal muscles by including weighted ab work to make
them pop out more from the sutured down area of the linea alba, which will give you a deeper
looking set of abs.
What we do is a lot of weighted ab exercises, like the ones you’re doing and seeing here.
You can see that we could do them either with a dumbbell, or by hanging weights off our
legs and doing weighted leg raises.
Anything that’s going to allow us to weight an exercise that we normally wouldn’t be
weighting is going to allow the muscles to be subjected to the same loading parameters
that you will with any other muscle group.
Which can lead to hypertrophy.
The thing we want to also focus on is how you’re performing them.
We realize that always training your abs slowly – not that it’s a bad thing because we
want to make sure we get good contraction – but always training your abs slowly is
really doing a disservice to the fact that there are type II fibers in your abdominal
muscles that aren’t being trained if you’re not training them explosively.
Start to include some high velocity movements that allow you to get a stronger, more powerful
contraction quicker, and your muscles will respond by actually growing a bit, and having
a deeper looking appearance to your abs.
First off, guys, I always say “If you want to look like an athlete you’ve got to train
like an athlete.”
That means training explosively.
It’s not limited to just your other muscles.
Your abs are a muscle that can be trained explosively as well.
This is 6-time Pro Bowl wide receiver Antonio Brown right here doing one of the ab sessions
that we do, and we get explosive.
The fact is, if you want your abs to get to pop you need to train them explosively and
powerfully.
The fact is, guys, there are a lot of things that we want to consider when it comes to
a complete ab training program.
I think all of them matter, as you see here.
Not just understanding the anatomy and understanding that there’s a lot more to the abs than
just the abs alone.
But knowing how to hit them and having a plan of attack on how to hit them in your ab workouts,
and then holding onto those key, key tips that allow you to get more range of motion,
a better breathing pattern, and including the right types of exercises.
It all matters, guys.
At ATHLEANX.com I care about it all.
I always say, “We put the science back in strength”.
If you’re looking for a complete program on how to train your abs and look like an
athlete because you’ve got to train like an athlete, so all these things always matter;
head over there and get our ATHLEANX training program.
In the meantime, if you’ve found this video helpful leave your comments and thumbs up
below.
Let me know what else I can cover for you and I’ll do my best to do that for you in
the days and weeks ahead.
All right, guys.
See you soon.