The abdominal muscles are somewhat interesting in that unlike most other muscles, they do not attach from bone to bone.
Instead they connect by fascia and tendinous bands that appear as three sets of horizontal lines or depressions, and one running down vertically to below the belly button giving rise to that aesthetically pleasing 'washboard' look.
The way to achieve six pack abs is to build strong abdominals and then to reveal them.
Building abs of steel...
It's often said that abs are 'made in the kitchen'. To a large extent, this is true.
The expression refers to your ability to watch your nutrition intake and choose quality nutrients in order to reduce your body fat levels significantly enough so that your abs may show through.
However, many folks can attest to the fact that there are lots of skinny people around with zero muscular definition.
Clearly, resistance training is part of the approach required to sculpt your six pack abs.
Resistance training will not only help you build strong abdominal muscles but may also assist in minimizing any lean muscle loss that may occur with caloric deficits.
How then, do you go about building a strong set of abs?
To train the movement muscles of the abdominal core region, many people typically use ab exercises such as the ab crunch, reverse crunch, oblique crunch, sit-ups, knee-ups, V-ups, leg raise, hanging leg raise, bicycle manoeuvre, scissors manoeuvre, roman chair side bends, and so many other ab exercise variations.
In fact, you may want to take a quick look at which exercises rated
'best ab exercises'
in one research study.
All of these examples are essentially 'unloaded' exercises, i.e., no weights used other than your own body weight.
Is this truly effective? Is it the best way to build six pack abs?
Electromyogram (EMG) studies testing muscle activity during these typical ab exercises show that the abdominal muscles are activated to at least 60 percent of maximum capacity with some reaching as high as 75 percent.
Technically, this is thought to be sufficient enough to cause hypertrophy-- at least for beginners and perhaps even intermediate exercisers.
For maximal abdominal definition, hypertrophy is desired.
Hypertrophy, or the enlargement of muscle fibres, is what will produce a strong delineation between the muscle bellies and the tendinous bands resulting in pronounced six pack abs.
Knowing that you can train abs using unloaded exercises is great news-- particularly if you prefer to workout from home and have little to no exercise equipment or very little exercise space available.
However, there are two factors to take into consideration.
First, you'll recall from our discussion on muscle fibre types that the rectus abdominis is more of a fast twitch Type II dominant muscle and therefore, will tend to respond best to high tension (i.e., heavy loads) and by necessity, shorter time under tension (i.e., fewer reps).
This suggests that the rectus abdominis is best trained using loaded exercises for optimal results.
Secondly, to continue making gains, remember that the Progressive Overload Principle always applies.
While you can overload the body by increasing the number of workouts per week, by adding exercises to your workout, by increasing the number of sets per exercise you perform, by decreasing your repetition tempo (the speed at which you perform each rep), by decreasing your rest intervals (the time to recover between sets and exercises), or through any combination of these and other methods-- in time, you will eventually need to add resistance in the form of loads.
For loaded exercises, you will always find a variety of machines for abdominal exercises in any gym.
My own preference is for cable machines when given the choice.
Unlike classic machines, movements are not guided along a set path or predetermined track. Additionally, you can literally train your core region in all three planes of motion.
Exercises like the 2-arm Cable Rotation or variations of the Cable Wood Chop are excellent. Plus, it offers a fairly rare opportunity to train the abdominals from a standing upright position.
Note that if you're a beginner who has completed your core stabilization phase and you workout from home, you can simulate these types of exercises with the use of sturdy resistance bands.
There are some very good resistance bands today that represent the equivalent of fairly heavy loads.
Generally, the appropriate repetition scheme for soliciting hypertrophy adaptations typically ranges between 8 and 12 reps per set. This means selecting a load that allows you to perform 8 to 12 reps without losing perfect form and technique.
If you have difficulty reaching 8 reps, your load is too heavy and you're no longer training optimally for hypertrophy gains. Conversely, if you can pump out more than 12 reps, your load is too light and you're not training optimally for hypertrophy gains.
This is partly why performing hundreds of crunches and similar variations of ab exercises are often thought to be a less than effective way to train your abs.
Training in high rep ranges solicit muscular endurance adaptations which of course, is fine if this is your training objective-- but the load is not heavy enough for hypertrophy gains.
As a rough guideline, beginners may want to train their abs using mostly unloaded exercises incorporating slower repetition tempos to emphasize maximal contraction of the abdominals.
Intermediate exercisers may want to incorporate an equal use of both loaded and unloaded exercises, while advanced exercisers may want to incorporate a ratio of 2 loaded exercises for every unloaded exercise.
I learned this years ago from the education vice-president of one of the top five fitness certifying agencies across the country. It's good advice.
A good ab training program should take advantage of both loaded and unloaded ab exercises to maximize your efforts at building strong abdominals.
So we've said that the way to achieve six pack abs is to build strong abdominals and then to reveal them.
But what if you weigh 130 pounds? Or, 170 pounds? Or more?
How do you know how much body fat you will need to lose and how do you know how long it will take you? This is the subject of Part 2 of building six pack abs...
