Gotta abs ‘em

Hey Marc,

I’m writing to you because I want you to share your secret about those washboard abs of yours. I’ve been working out for more than a year now and have lost most of the baby fat I had, except for my stomach area. I have a 31-inch waistline, but I can’t seem to get my ab muscles to surface. I’ve tried a combination of diet and exercise, but still no success. Maybe you can share with me your abdominal workout routine.

Glenn In LA

I’m always happy to hear of people being inspired to work out and get in shape. From the sound of it, you’re pretty well on the way already, and just need that final bit of tweaking to get to a level you’re reasonably happy with (trust me, you’ll never be 100 percent perfectly happy with your body, it’s our continual striving to reach that goal that keeps us in shape).

Now, a 31-inch waistline is very respectable for any guy (assuming he’s over 5 feet tall), and so I’m guessing that you look pretty trim when wearing every day clothes. Your disappointment comes when you remove your shirt and don’t see the defined abs poking out. What you should try is to feel beneath the skin and trace the outline of your abs with your fingertips. Is there a deep and well-defined groove between them? If this is so then it’s just a matter of lowering your body fat content a bit more in order for them to poke out more prominently.

However, if your abs just feel flat but firm, without the clearly defined deep groove, then it means that your external abdominal muscles may be slightly underdeveloped. The way to fix this of course is to work them out. Remember that the abdominal muscle works in much the same way as the rest of the muscles in your body. If you want them to get bigger, then you need to train them properly. Think of how you train your other body parts. If you want a bigger chest, what do you do? You lift heavy weights and mix up your workout by doing different exercises that concentrate on different areas of the chest (bench-press, incline and decline press, flys etc.) If you’re toning, then maybe you do higher reps of a lighter weight.

It sounds like you need to make your external abs bigger, so that they poke through your thin layer of fat and skin and stand out more. The way to do this is the same as mentioned for the chest. Lift heavy. If you’re doing crunches, try and weigh yourself down by holding a barbell across your chest and doing less reps. Keep increasing the weight till you find one that will allow you to struggle to make it to 15 reps. Then increase the weight again and try for 10. For your third set, yep, you guessed it, increase the weight a bit more and push for 8 reps. By going really heavy, you’ll increase the size of your abs fairly quickly. However, don’t just stick to one exercise in the same way you wouldn’t just stick to bench press for your chest.

For most people, the road to a six-pack often plateaus at a four-pack. The upper abdominals are a lot easier to develop than the lower, and so they are usually the ones that will poke through first. Traditional exercises such as crunches target this area. However, if you want a true six-pack, then you’re going to have to do some serious work on the lower abdominals. Exercises that work the lower abs are generally extension exercises rather than crunch-based ones. A very effective exercise for lower abs are leg lifts. Hang from a chin- up bar and try to raise your legs up in front of you. The straighter you keep your legs the harder it is, and you know the old saying, no pain, no gain! Most people will have some difficulty keeping the legs straight at first, so you can begin with them slightly bent and work up to the straight leg lifts (the lower abs do more of the work with the straighter legs). If you have mastered lifting your straight legs to a 90 degree angle from your body, you can progress to the harder task of trying to lift them up completely so that your feet touch the chin-up bar. This is an old gymnastics exercise that I used to dread, but boy is it effective!

Most traditional ab exercises that your trainer teaches you can be adapted to increase the size of your abs rather than just tone them. Just add more resistance so that they become a lot harder to do, thus forcing you to work harder to do less reps. Occasionally mix this up by shocking your muscles with high rep- low resistance exercises as well, but concentrate more on the heavy exercises. Also, don’t forget to work your obliques as well by trying your traditional ab exercises but twisting your torso halfway through the movement.

Lastly, stay committed. You’ve come this far in your desire to get in shape, so push the effort just that little bit further and by summer next year you should be in great "almost-perfect" Boracay shape. Good luck!

Marc

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