Winter abs: twelve weeks to a six-pack spring

Flex, Jan, 2003 by Victor Martinez

Don't think for a minute that bodybuilding hasn't captured the minds of the general public. How else do you explain the sudden wave of wannabes trying to outstrip each other for the sole purpose of showing off their newfound abs? That's a good thing, of course, but it burdens you, as a bona fide bodybuilder, with responsibility of being their beau ideal, and that's a hunting thought. Come summer, they'll be flashing their torsos, and as good as their abdominal development might be, yours will need to be so much deeper, thicker, more complete, defined, separated and perfectly proportionate with the rest of your mass and muscularity that they will gasp, slack-jawed and wide-eyed, and beg for your secret.

I have the secret to my personal abdominal program, but you have to initiate it now and stay with it faithfully for 12 weeks. It's no fun; most of the time you'll be unable to straighten your body because of midsection muscle cramps, but you'll love me for it at the end.

We'll get to the guts of the workouts in a minute, but first, a few ab training principles. These, after all, are what extract the best results from your workout, no matter which exercises you use.

THE SUPER-7 SIX-PACK PRINCIPLES

1 Train abs first Regardless of the day's bodypart sequence, abs come first. Monday, for example, is legs day for me, which means I go through my entire abdominal routine before I start my leg workout. Likewise, Friday is back day. That's another scheduled ab workout, and I complete all of it before I get to my back.

2 Slow reps Never use rapid reps for abs. Not only does a quick rep pace force you to rely on your hip flexors instead of your midsection muscles, but the momentum causes your pelvis to rotate forward against your lower spine, setting the stage for serious disc pinching or cumulative stress on various joints. Only with slow repetitions can you make your ab muscles control the movement and do all the work. set,

3 Continuous tension For every repetition of ab every set, I maintain very tight continuous tension on my ab muscles. I'm a big believer in using the fullest effective range of motion, but not at the expense of continuous tension. Preserving both requires intense concentration and control. I contract as hard as possible and extend as far as possible, but at neither extreme do I allow my abs to relax. For situps, I do not let my back touch the pad as I extend backward. For leg raises, I keep my knees slightly bent throughout the set and lower my legs to only about 25 degrees above bottom dead center before smoothly transitioning into the next lift.

4 Decline Roman-chair situps I like changing my abdominal exercises frequently, but a staple in all of my ab workouts is decline Romanchair situps. These let me get a good stretch on the way down and a good squeeze at the top, while maintaining tension through that extensive range of motion. It also allows me to innovate and vary my technique, sometimes using alternating twists and sometimes crunching out side situps, all of which are necessary for digging deep alongside the entire length of the rectus abdominis and carving muscularity into the obliques and serratus areas.

5 Free-hanging leg raises Just as situps are the best of all basics for upper and middle ab mass, so are leg raises sine qua non for lower rectus definition and tightness. Caution, however: Do not stabilize any part of your body while perfonning leg raises. Doing so causes the hip fiexors, rather than the abdominals, to lift the legs and forces the pelvis to once again rotate against the lower spine. If your back and hips are free, you can more easily control your ab muscle contractions over a greater range of motion, as well as experiment with variations such as hanging from a horizontal bar, supporting yourself on dip bars, crossing your feet, and side or angled raises.

6 Learn to breathe Proper and deep breathing is a bodybuilding fundamental, but when training abs, do not breathe as hard as for other bodyparts. Take in enough air to oxygenate your body, but during the contraction phase, exhale and squeeze your abs very hard. The more air you retain in your lungs, the more your diaphragm pushes against your abs and prevents them from fully contracting.

7 Use only the right amount of training Your abdominal muscles need attention but not fanatical attention. The optimum amount of work for your abs is contingent upon how competently you manage the development of the rest of your body. Just as it's possible to overtrain another bodypart, so is it possible to overtrain your abdominals. The rectus abdominis, your six-pack muscle, grows so easily that, before you know it, you can develop a "gut" of protruding ab muscles that destroy your body's proportions. That's a classic symptom of the inexperienced bodybuilder who is so inspired by seeing his abs responding faster than expected that he works them even harder and ends up building them so big that his other muscle groups appear small by comparison.