Abs Training Guide

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 Myths and Facts

First of all, let’s start with debunking the most common myths and misconceptions about abs trainig.
I’ve collected the three myths that are the most frequently mentioned and are the most harmful, most timewasting advices I have ever heard.

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!

Tags: abs, anatomy, debunk, facts, hard work, misconception, myths, pain, pitfalls, six-pack, warning

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