Guys and girls, we all love having abs.
All our favorite people have it.
And it’s simply one of those muscles that symbolizes the peak of fitness.
When it comes down to actually getting it, we always been told one thing: “ABS are
made in the kitchen!”
Such a saying implies that your six pack goals comes down to fixing your diet, and more importantly,
stop eating so darn much.
Now, fixing your diet has a lot of benefits, and all health and fitness goals should certainly
start with tinkering with the type of food you eat and how much of it you should be eating.
But if we’re strictly talking about abs, then dietbing along isn’t going to… cut
it.
Personally, I think a more fitting phrase would be, “Abs are made in the gym… but…
revealed in the kitchen!”
Let’s elaborate.
Again, when it comes down to abs made in the kitchen, the implication is that you need
to eat less.
The principle of cutting weight and cutting fat comes down to excess energy expenditure.
The dreaded, “burn more calories than you consume.”
The fat layer covering your awesome, amazing washboard abs will hypothetically fall off
over time.
But, if cutting calories is truly all you did, you’ll come to the sad realization
that, although you might look skinnier, unfortunately, you still ain’t no splitting image of the
90’s Brad Pitt.
So, what the heck went wrong?
The thing is, believe it or not, your abdominal muscles are just that, muscles.
Going on a diet or just losing weight isn’t going to help you build muscle.
In fact, going on a long-term diet deficit more than likely will make your body eat away
at the very little amount of muscle you might have had on your abs to begin with.
Instead of ending up with a shredded six-pack, you just become…
skinny fat.
The remedy, as we’ve alluded to earlier, is exercise.
If you want to make abs, you will have to physically train them.
Training also has a preservative effect, fighting against your body’s desire to break down
the muscle tissue, which is especially important for situations where you’re eating at a
deficit.
The target muscle, in particular, is the rectus abdominis, which is the outermost layer of
your anterior core, consisting of the muscle bellies we are all familiar with.
Conventionally, we’ve been taught to do crunches or sit-ups to build your abs since
that’s the type of movement our rectus abdominis is used for, aka spinal flexion.
However, the industry is starting to move away from such exercises for various reasons
including its link to neck pain and unnatural spinal compression.
Nowadays, people train using exercises such as the popular plank, ab wheel rolls, l-sits,
and now, even with weights.
Training surrounding muscles will help, too, as far as aesthetics, like building up your
chest, your obliques, and your lats.
Fitness-wise, it also makes sense to train your posterior chain, the muscles opposite
in function of your abs.
Doing so will create a more balanced core.
But, coming back to strictly abs.
Again, we need to not only fix the diet, but make sure we hit it hard with proper training
as well.
Only when you combine the two will you have any chance of getting the abs you so desire.
And for you ladies, if you’re concerned that you’re going to get too bulky with
training the abs, no need to worry.
The amount of testosterone women have just won’t let that happen unless you’re using
“enhancements.”
And finally, I hope this clears up the misconception of abs being made solely in the kitchen.
So, the next time someone tells you that, you can either show them this video or tell
them, “do you even plank bro?”
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