She got it wrong...

As for the answer to your question:
Yes, there are a few abs training exercises you can do sitting in a chair.

But I’ll make it clear now: these exercises won’t bring half as much improvement as the best exercises I’ve discussed in this blog earlier. However, doing these less effective exercises is still WAY BETTER than not doing any exercises at all! The key point here is the same as with other workouts: make it a daily routine, or at least an every-other-daily routine (yes, I just made up that word). Consistency and repetition is the key ingredient of most great achievements.

If you don’t have your own well separated office, you might feel awkward doing some of these exercises. But don’t worry, as my sifu always tells, “a wonder lasts for three days”. When your colleagues first notice what you’re doing, they will be surprised, maybe even curious. They might think you’re a weirdo. Some of them might even laugh at you behind your back. So what… The next day they will still think there’s something wrong with you. Next week, they will get totally used to it, and everything will be back to normal. Again, this is my own experience. Been there, done that. Actually, when a fellow student seen me once doing these exercises before a very long and extremely boring presentation, she asked me what am I doing (in a nice way). I told her I’m doing my pre-sleep workout routine. She then tried these exercises, and was very happy about it, apparently. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t recommend using this method to pick up chicks

So let’s move on to the actual exercises.

1. Spread knee lifts:
Sitting on your chair, spread your thighs a bit so that they shape a V. Lift your left knee up as high as you can, hold it there for a second, then lower it back to the ground. Do it 15-20 times with the left and then with the right leg. This exercise utilize most muscles down from the obliqes to the thighs.

2. Closed knee lifts:
Sit with your legs closed together, your knees touching each other. Let your arms support your upper body weight by leaning on the sides of your chair. Raise both knees towards your chest, as high as you can. Hold them at the highest point for a second, then slowly lower them back. Repeat 10 times. Don’t worry if you can’t raise your knees up for more than a couple of inches. Just raise as high as you can. This is a very good abs training exercise that utilizes most of the abdominal muscles.

3. Sit uptight, and do  ab vacuums.

4. Ab twists:
Sit with your legs closed together, with a straight back. If you have a water bottle nearby, then take it in your hands. Extend your hands forward, both holding the bottle. With your legs staying fixed on the ground in front of you, slowly but steadily turn your upper body to the left. Make sure you reach the point from where you can’t turn any further. Hold it for a couple of seconds, then turn back to the middle and do the same to the right side. Repeat 5-10 times on both sides.

These four easy exercises will keep you fit every day, pump some blood into your limbs and make you fresh, ready for the rest of the long day at work.

I hope you found this article useful. I’ll be back soon with more abs training tips, stay tuned!

The exercise is called ab vacuum. Don’t be afraid, it’s not related to carrying around some kind of vacuum suction device. At first glance, it’s a simple exercise that’s basically contracting cour inner abdominal muscles. It was very well-known and popular among body builders of the 1970’s and 1980’s. However, for a complete abs training, the ab vacuum must be practiced regularly.

What are the benefits of the ab vacuum exercise?
By doing the ab vacuum, you contract the transversus abdominus. By improving this inner abdominal muscle, you will gain additional core strength, and your waistline will get thinner as well. It will also prevent developing a protruding belly, which happens to many practitioners of common abs training exercises. The transversus abdominus is a supporting mucles. It holds your intestines and more generally your stomach ‘in place’ during an intensive workout. Although the transversus is hidden, when it’s contracted your other abdominal muscles will look more defined and toned. Finally, a stronger inner muscle means a much smaller
chance of back pain.

So how do I perform this great exercise?

1. Stand up, putting your hands on your hips on both sides.
2. Exhale all the air out of your lungs. This might be harder at first than it sounds, just keep pushing.
3. Pull your stomach in as much as you can while you exhale, as if you were trying to touch your belly button to your spine.
4. Hold this position for 20 seconds. Keep breathing into your chest at a normal pace. You shouldn’t hold your breath while doing the exercise.
5. After 20 seconds, finish the exercise by easing your ab muscles.

That’s it. This is a very easy and very effective exercise. You can do it while standing in a queue, listening to your mom on the phone or waiting for the bus. You won’t break a sweat either, so there’s no excuse for not doing it every day.

How often should I do it?
First two weeks: 3 x 20 seconds every day.
Third to fourth weeks: 3 x 30 seconds every day.
Fifth week and after: 3 x 60 seconds every day.

For the best results, you should do the repetitions consecutively.

Oh, and please tell your friends about the best abs training exercise that nobody knows of!

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.

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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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.

Warning!
Reading below might make you run around screaming “Oh my god, why the hell did I beleive so much crap for all those years?”
Yeah… I’m sorry folks, you’ve probably wasted countless hours and perhaps thousands of dollars on the wrong training methods. Yet you’re still here, wondering where are those six-pack abs you’ve been promised to get. Well, I’ll tell you that, just keep reading.

Myth #1:
“Special equipment, weights or other apparell is required to get six-pack abs fast.”

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.
So to summarize it in once sentence: You don’t need any equipment for abs training!

Myth #2:
“You have to train really hard and endure lots of pain to get six-pack abs.”

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.
So how much time and pain does it take then? 2-3 times a week, 10-20 minutes at a time. That’s 20-60 minutes a week. Really. I’m not kidding.
You just have to know how to spend that time to get most of the result. Have you ever heard about the Pareto principle? It says: 20 percent of the effort generates 80 percent of the results. This can be applied to abs training as well.
Another question you might ask: “If I train every day, do I get six-pack faster?”

No you don’t. There are two reasons for this. First, your muscles need approximately 24 hours to regenerate and even more time to grow bigger. If you train hard every day, you keep tearing the muscle fibers faster then your body rebuilds them. I’ll talk about the second reason when I discuss the third and final myth:

Myth #3:
“Abs training will give me a six-pack.”
What the hell? How is this wrong? What’s this blog about then, anyways?
Calm down. It’s not completely wrong. It’s just half of the truth. One can follow the best abs training program for years, yet still have a terrible, disgusting soft belly. The trick is, you have to follow a good training AND lose fat in order to make those well developed six-packs visible. Yes, you have to lose fat. Sounds terrible, right? No. It’s actually pretty easy and doesn’t require eating less. I will post some diet ideas later on this blog.
Just keep in mind until then, that to get great, defined, toned abs, you’ll have to do both of these things:

• Follow a good abs training program.

• Change your eating habits so that you lose body fat.

Men need a body fat percentage of about 10, while women need about 14% to get well defined, visible six-packs.

So these were the well-known myths of six-pack training. But that’s what they are: myths. You should treat them as such. Many qualified and unqualified trainers will tell you these in the future. Depending on your personality, either let them know how wrong they are (don’t forget to tell them the truth), or just nod your head and pretend you agree. Abs training myths – busted!

I’ll show you lots of things, debunk centuries-old myths and misconceptions, teach you the basics, the anatomy, the best and most effective exercises and routines, help you develop some really useful habits, give you diet tips, and tell you some secrets that will blow your mind and boost your abs training.

Who am I and why am I writing this blog?

I’m 23 years-old computer geek who has been doing all kinds of sports since the age of 7. I started writing this blog to provide you with all the useful information on abdominal training, so that you won’t waste your time and money on the wrong methods. I did Judo, rowing, kayaking, basketball, streetball, beach volleyball, kick-boxing, breakdancing, tai chi chuan and wing chun kung fu. And I’ve spent half of my life sitting in front of my computer. Quite controversial right?


Actually it isn’t controversial. I’ll be honest with you: I’m a lazy guy. I’m usually too lazy to do anything productive, including sports. Man, it’s damn hard to start moving! We all know that.  So the key to the mystery is: I enjoy sports. I enjoy moving once it’s already started. We all do, because we are humans and that’s how our body works.

Your body rewards you for improving it!

Once you start moving, your heartbeat gets more rapid, your body temperature raises and your brain starts adjusting hormone levels. Exercising will reduce the level of so called ’stress hormones’ like cortisol, and will raise the level of endorphine. Endorphine is the ultimate crack! It gives you instant joy and happiness, even euphoria, and has no known malicious side-effects. The word endorphine actually means “a morphine-like substance originating from within the body”.  All-natural, legal and non-addictive.

Society rewards you for improving your body!

Guys! Have you ever heard a woman say “Wow, this guy has such a great body!” ? I have, like a million times. Beleive me, women get really excited about men with perfect bodies, just as we drool on Ana Kournikova or Maria Sharapova.

Ladies! Although most men say “A little fat on your tummy is very sexy.”, we actually prefer women with thin waists. Ever heard of 36-24-36 (or 90-60-90)? It’s hard-coded into men’s brains to get excited about a female body with those parameters. For some reference, here’s the woman with the sexiest abs ever.

Other benefits of abs training

There are many other effects that can be related directly or undirectly to exercising your adbomen. Here are some examples:

• Faster, more efficient metabolism
• Improved core strength
• Greatly reduced risk of back pain and spinal injuries
• Better overall health
• Better mood in your everyday life
• Showing up on the beach half-naked without shame

I’m sure you already know you wanna do it. Stay tuned, and I’ll show you how to do proper abs training!