Obtaining nice abs may not be as hard as you may think. Sure for some the road to a six-pack may be longer than for others but the work you have to put in is the same. Envision yourself proudly displaying your new well shaped and well trained abs at the beach, pool, or showing them off wearing a half shirt.
The key to well shaped abs starts with the training and most people do not know how to do this correctly. Lets review the three fundamentals of ab training to help give you a more clear picture of how to shape your abs correctly.
Three Things to Remember to Train Your Abs
1. Breathing Correctly
Let it be known that your abs will not contract all the way when there is air in your lungs. Many people try to hold their breath when perfroming ab workouts. The ab muscles will never fully contract while holding your breath.
The best thing to do is breathe out with every repetition you perform. Exhaling while exerting your ab muscles will allow them to fully contract and get the proper ab workout. Scientifically, exhaling allows the abdominal muscles to contract fully rather than relying on your hip flexors or gravity to do the job.
2. Don’t Rest Your Abs Too Long
When performing any type of ab exercise or ab workout routine, understand that your abs will not take long to recover between sets. While most major muscle groups in your body take minutes to recover between sets, your abs will not take more that just a few seconds. With that in mind, be sure to workout your abs in a continuous fluid movement with very little rest. Setup your ab workout routine so you can flow from one ab exercise to another with continous movement until you just can’t take it anymore.
Any ab exercise routines you see that are longer than 5 minutes are most likely taking way too much time in between sets. The best routines take very little breaks.
3. Work Your Abs From Bottom Up
When you exercise your abs, be sure to workout your lower abs first. The reason you start there first is because when you tighten your lower abs, all of the other ab muscles tighten at the same time in order to stabilize your entire body.
So in a sense, when you work your lower abs, you are working all the other ab muscles as well, including the upper abdominals and obliques. You should workout your lower abs until you are exhausted and can’t perform anymore reps. At that point you should move into a torso workout to work your obliques until you can’t do any more; then finishing with an upper ab workout like crunches.
Don’t worry too much about not being able to perform to many reps on your obliques and upper abs after working yourself to exhaustion on your lower abs. This is normal. Just be sure to keep the break time low and to keep a continuous movement between ab exercises.
Also, instead of fixating on the amount of reps you can perform, concentrate more on your breathing and contracting your abs. Just do the ab workout routine until you can’t go anymore.
Exercise is Only One Phase
Of course you are going to have to exercise your abs if you want develop a six-pack. Focusing specifically on your abs three times a week is a good number to go for. You don’t need to work them more because if you are exercising other parts of your body, your ab muscles are more than likely being worked as well. But exercise alone will not be enough to get those killer abs you’ve always wanted. Exercise is just one phase, dieting and life control is another.
Get into a habit of eating healthy foods low in fat and high in protein. To many of us, this means a complete change in lifestyle. But a lifestyle where you can still eat great foods and not starve yourself. Think about not only how healthy you’ll look, but how healthy you’ll actually be and feel as a result.
