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:
- The nerves (or neural network) that send signals to and stimulate the muscles
- The blood vessels that carry ‘fuel’ to the muscles and remove the waste products.
- 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:
- The obliques. These are the muscles on the left and right side of your abdomen.
- The transversus. The internal muscle that pulls back the abdominal wall.
- The muscles around the pelvic girdle. These are supporting your internal organs.
- 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)
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:
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.
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.
Warning!
Man, no way! Don’t ever beleive this! All you need is your own body. Your body is the greatest device ever created. Actually, one of its main features is that it can (and WILL) improve by itself if it gets the proper stimulus and fuel. There are exercises for every single abdominal muscle fiber that can be done without any fancy equipment. Actually, some of those devices that are used by millions of people every day are not helping but LIMITING your progress. In fact many of them are messing with your body’s natural mechanics, causing you harm. The only reason they are so popular is that they are sold by professional marketers. There’s lots of money in the training equipment business, and we all know how people can be hypnotized by ads. Especially when it’s about their health and looks.
This is the most common pitfall. I think it originates from those Sylvester Stallone movies with the guy training every day, pushing his limits, showing incredible pain on his face in the process. Those are just movies. Entertaining but unrealistic. If the main character achieved his goal by training 15 minutes a day, would it be exciting? Would it be epic? I don’t think so. Realism is boring.
