Abs, arguably the most sought-after aesthetic goal in all of fitness.
It’s not a surprise that so much of fitness marketing revolves around getting abs, with
even crazy promises of abs as quick as 6 minutes.
Interesting.
Unfortunately, that’s not exactly the case.
There’s a little bit more to it.
So, let’s go over some of the best and true practices for getting abs.
We’ll also bust a few ab training myths along the way.
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Let’s start off with a myth: No, you don’t have to do hundreds of crunches and crunch
variations.
The issue with this high rep approach is the lack of progressive muscular overload.
To build muscle of any kind, you have to continuously provide a stronger stimulus than you did prior,
often through increasing work volume.
Higher reps can somewhat achieve this but hardly in an effective manner since reps are
only one factor of volume progression.
Best practice is to not only continuously increase reps, but also increase intensity,
or resistance.
Something like 10 to 15 reps of a very challenging intensity for a few sets will be better than
100 reps of easy crunches.
As you progress, you can further increase the intensity and/or rep count of the exercise,
but you don’t need crazy rep numbers.
Speaking of exercise, let’s talk about exercise options.
Now, your abs, or rectus abdominis, is only a single muscle.
Any type of exercise employing lumbar flexion will stimulate the entirety of your abs.
However, stimulation is not all equal.
EMG data suggest that exercises that lead with the upper body to initiate lumbar flexion,
like crunches, have a greater propensity to stimulate the upper abs.
Movements that involve more posterior pelvic tilting, or initiating with the bottom portion
of the torso and legs, tend to stimulate the lower abs better.
With this in mind, best practice is probably to have more than one exercise in your ab
training repertoire to effectively target both the upper and lower abs.
Now keep in mind that we need to factor in intensity.
For beginners, when targeting the upper abs, 10 to 15 good crunches might be challenging
enough.
For the more advanced, doing crunches with a medicine ball on your chest or a 10-pound
plate behind your head would be good ways to progress intensity.
Cable crunches, where it’s easier to adjust the resistance, can work as well.
For lower abs, doing lying leg lifts is a good starting point, just make sure you do
them properly.
As you progress, you can move on to something like decline leg lifts and then hanging leg
lifts for more of a challenge.
Partner-resisted lying leg lifts where a partner pushes your legs back towards the floor can
also be a step up.
Make sure you don’t forget the rest of your core, like your obliques.
The obliques’ function is to laterally flex and rotate the trunk.
Cable chops and weighted side bends are good options here.
Now, although ab-specific exercises are needed to build your ab muscles, for overall strength
and stability development, best practice is to have an overall workout plan that also
incorporate larger movements that require core stability.
I’m talking about exercises like squats and deadlifts.
These will develop stronger stability throughout the entire core, including the rectus abdominis,
obliques, transverse abdominis, and the spinal erectors, the muscles responsible for other
side of sagittal lumbar movement, lumbar extension.
To a lesser extent, unilateral movements, movements employing one side of the body at
a time, like single-arm presses, develop the core as well.
With all this being said, exercise choice still ultimately comes down to you.
Choose the ones you personally find most effective.
Just get that intensity up.
Now, on to another popular myth: training the abs every single day.
Sure, you CAN technically train your abs every single day.
Whether that’s best practice, however, is another story.
According to muscle hypertrophy experts Bret Contreras and Brad Schoenfeld, much like all
other muscles, the abs go through the wringer of elevated muscle protein synthesis post-workout
for about 48 hours.
If you train your abs again before the 48 hours, you’re probably hindering peak muscle
growth and over time, it MIGHT lead to localized overtraining.
Plus, the vertebral discs of your spine might actually need more recovery time.
So don’t risk back problems tomorrow for the sake of chiseled abs today.
Best practice: take that 2 days of recovery before training abs again.
Now, to top everything off, let’s get to the most factor of all: nutrition.
You simply cannot escape this one.
You might have even heard of the old saying, “abs are made in the kitchen.”
Personally, I don’t completely agree with that statement and would rather say it’s
more in line with, “abs are made in the gym but revealed in the kitchen.”
If I were to give it an arbitrary percentage, I would say the battle for getting abs is
30% training and 70% nutrition.
Nutrition for getting abs follows all the same rules as any general fat loss goal, which
I’ve covered in detail in past videos.
But long story short, you need to maintain a calorie deficit.
Fewer calories consumed than calories burned.
Some basic tips to help you along the way is to aim for more healthy whole food choices
containing fewer calories but are nutrient dense.
I’m talking about green veggies, starchy carbs, lean meats, beans, and so on.
More protein is always recommended on this channel, especially for fat loss, as protein
has shown to help with hunger and appetite and mitigate muscle loss.
Other tools that you might wanna try is intermittent fasting to manage hunger or carb cycling,
which base food intake on your workout plan.
If tinkering with nutrition is not an easy task for you, then you might want to consider
increasing calories burned instead.
For some, steady state cardio would be good to achieve that.
For others, something like HIIT, or high intensity interval training, would be a better fit,
especially if time is an issue.
I’ll make sure to put links for my videos on these various nutrition and calorie burning
strategies in the description if you want more details.
And that pretty much covers the best practices, in my opinion, on getting abs.
I’m sure some of you have your own great tips and best practices so please share some
of your ideas in the comments below.
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I really appreciate all of you that currently support me through Patreon, and if you want
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If you enjoyed video, please give it a thumbs up and share it with your ab-loving friends.
As always, thank you for watching and GET YOUR PROTEIN!