Abs Training Guide

The Best Abs Training Exercises

If you’ve been reading about abs training for a couple of weeks, you must have read about at least 20-30 exercises for the abdominal muscles. You probably can’t even keep in mind that many, not to mention doing them all. So here’s the question:
What are the best ab exercises?

I’ve composed a list of them, which I’ll show you now. The exercises are in increasing order of difficulty.

• crunches
• cross knee crunches
• leg raises (lying)
• reverse crunches
• vertical leg thrusts
• knee raises (hanging)

You can start with the easier ones, do just three or four types at one session and switch to harder exercises as you progress. I’ll show you some special exercises in my next post, that are also necessary for successful abs training.
I’ll give you a complete, recommended training program in one of my later posts. But now, let’s see how to do each of these exercises.

Crunches:
The most basic exercise in abs training. Lie on your back. Pull your knees up, so that they are at a 60 degree angle to your torso. You can bend your knees, or just let your feet rest on a chair or something. Your hands should be touching the sides of your head.
Now try to touch your breastbone to your pelvis by slowly raising your shoulders. Breath out as you do it. Your hips shouldn’t move, only your spine bends. Do these slowly, don’t use momentum.

Cross knee crunches:
Same as crunches, but now you try to crunch diagonally. Try to touch your left shoulder to your right knee, then your right shoulder to your left knee. At the top position, one side of your hips should be off the ground.

Leg raises:
The basic and exercise for lower abs training. Lie on your back, with your hands under your buttocks. Raise your legs about 20cm (8″) off the floor and hold them there. Using your lower ab muscles, raise your legs by another 20cm by tilting your pelvis. Your knees should be slightly bent.

Reverse crunches:
For this exercise, you need something behind your head to hold. This can be the legs of a chair, the ankles of a training partner or anything that’s fixed into that position. Lying on your back, holding the thing behind your head, raise your knees above your chest by pulling your pelvis and legs up. Your knees should be bent. Then return to the starting position.

Vertical leg thrusts:
My favorite abs training exercise.
Lie on your back, placing your hands under your buttocks. Knees slightly bent, raise your legs up from the ground by about 20cm (8″). Raise your head and shoulders a bit as well, if you can, to increase the stress on your abs.
This is the initial position. Now the exercise has four steps:

1. Raise your legs by contracting your abs, until your feet are above your pelvis.
2. Breathing out, thrust your heels up, towards the ceiling. Your pelvis should raise as well.
3. Lower your pelvis back from the thrust, setting it between your hands again.
4. Lower your legs back to the starting position, keeping your knees slightly bent.

Knee raises:
You’re gonna need a branch of a tree, a water pipe or something else that’s strong enough to support your body weight for this exercise. A chin-up bar is the best, if you have access to one. Grabbing the bar with a grip a bit wider than your shoulders, raise your knees up to your chest. Your ankles should be crossed, and you should only use your abs to do the work. Lower your knees slowly, relaxing your ab muscles. Don’t extend your legs, keep those knees bent throughout the whole exercise.

This concludes the six best abs training exercises. They are effective, simple and safe. Just keep in mind that if your lower back hurts while doing any of these exercises, you should bend your knees a little bit more.

In the next post, I’ll show you special abs training exercises that are also required for a complete ab workout.
Until then, you should check out The Winsor Pilates Buzz for the best body improvement and energy-boosting techniques.

Tags: abs, basics, crunches, exercises, knee raises, leg raises, muscle improvement, routines

08.Jul.09 basics, exercises Comments (0)

The Anatomy of Abs Training

I’ve decided to make a post about the basic anatomy of abs training, and more generally muscle improvement. I hope that by understanding how your body works, you’ll get an additional boost and incentive for your training. So let’s start!

We can break down muscles into three main components:

1. The nerves (or neural network) that send signals to and stimulate the muscles
2. The blood vessels that carry ‘fuel’ to the muscles and remove the waste products.
3. The muscle fibers, which do the actual work by contracting.

When you exercise your muscles, the following things happen:

• The blood vessels get bigger in diameter, allowing more blood carriage.
• The nerves create more connections between each other, allowing faster, controlled, more direct stimulus.
• The muscle fibers get bigger and thus stronger.

Your abdominals have tens of thousands of muscle fibers. Any time you do an exercise like crunches, some of these muscle fibers contract, but not all. There’s no exercise for contracting all the muscle fibers at the same time.
A muscle fiber is either fully contracted or not contracted at all. There’s no state in between. If you do an exercise ‘harder’, you actually contract more fibers. When doing the same exercise multiple times, the first fiber to contract is always the first, at every repetition.
So if you do, say, 100 crunches, you contract the same small group of fibers 100 times, but don’t contract other groups at all. Eventually the contracted group’s fibers will burn out, meaning they won’t be able to contract anymore until you give them some time to regenerate. This is not the way to do abs training. It’s painful and inefficient.

The muscle fibers only get bigger if you stress them (make them contract). You must do a variety of exercises to stress all of the abdominal muscles if you want a complete abs training.
Here are the main abdominal regions that you’ll have to exercise in order to get six-pack abs:

1. The obliques. These are the muscles on the left and right side of your abdomen.
2. The transversus. The internal muscle that pulls back the abdominal wall.
3. The muscles around the pelvic girdle. These are supporting your internal organs.
4. The spinalis erectae. It’s actually not an abdominal muscle. It supports your lower back and the spine.

These are the basics that you as a trainee should get familiar with. The exercises I’m gonna show you (probably in my next post) were selected to give you a full, healthy, complete abs training.

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Tags: abdominal muscles, abs, anatomy, basics, facts, muscle fibers, muscle groups, muscle improvement

08.Jul.09 anatomy, basics, facts Comments (0)

Abs Training Basics

There is a huge confusion and misunderstanding around abs training. Some trainers and trainees place emphasis on exercising hard every day, without even understanding how abs and generally how muscles work.
First of all, you have to have a clear goal. Ask yourself this question now: “Why do I want to train my abs?”

Possible answers are:

1. To lose fat from the abdominal area.
2. To develop a nice, visible six-pack.
3. To improve core strength.

Your training methods will depend on your chosen goal. However, the goals I mentioned above are not independent from each other. Keeping that in mind, I’ll tell you now what to do to achieve the one you’ve chosen.

1. How to lose fat from the abdominal area?
Probably the most difficult and most important question in abs training. Let’s face it, most of us have excess belly fat. And most of us want to get rid of it. Well, here’s the trick. Cardio and weight training is not enough. Diet is not enough. You have to do all three of these! Okay, I can hear you know saying “Damn, I give up, I’m too lazy to spend several hours a week in the gym and eat crappy food.” You don’t have to! Here’s what you’ll have to do:

a) Do 10-20 minutes of muscle training 2-3 times a week.

b) Do some cardio ‘training’ once or twice a week. Cardio training can be anything that raises your heart rate by 50%    for at least 10 minutes, including going to work by bike, or playing football with your friends. Making love also counts.

c) Follow a high protein, low carbs, low fat diet.

That’s it. It isn’t hard at all.

2. How to develop a nice, visible six-pack?
This is the most common question related to abs training. If you’re reading this, you’re probably looking for a way to get visible, toned, delicious six-pack abs. Actually, this question is highly related to the first one. It has been said many times, that everybody has a six-pack, but most people have it well-hidden under a layer of fat. That’s true. To make them visible, you only have to lose fat. The fastest way to achieve that, is to follow the points a), b) and c) I’ve written for the previous goal. Sure, you can do it without any muscle training. You can do it even without cardio-training. But to get fast results, you have to do them all. Without muscle training, you’ll get a ‘flat’ six-pack. Without cardio-training, it will take a lot of time to lose fat. Without the proper diet, your muscle development will be slower and/or you won’t lose any fat.

3. How to improve core strength?
This is an important question for people who do some kind of martial arts, or other sports that require strong kicks, jumps and body twists. The answer is: you have to follow the proper abs training program. There are exercises specifically developed to improve core strength. Without getting deep into anatomy, let’s just say that you’ll have to train the lateral muscles of your abdomen as well. The upside is that if this is your goal, you won’t have to lose fat at all. No cardio-training is required. For the downside, you’ll have to do some more muscle training. Following the diet helps, but isn’t necessary.

So hopefully you’ve decided which achievement are you aiming for. Stay tuned, in my next few posts I’ll show you the abs training methods that will help you achieve each or all of the possible abs training goals.

Tags: abs, achievements, basics, core strength, facts, goals, lose fat, six-pack, visible six-pack

07.Jul.09 anatomy, basics, facts Comments (0)