Transcription
Dear friends, hello.
Today, I will try to save you a lot of time. For some, that might be a few months of saved time, and for others, years of useless or inefficient workouts. I am here not to promote yet another trendy and inefficient content. On the contrary, my main goal is to make my viewers healthier and their workouts yield better results.
Let's start!
Please pay attention to your abs exercise routines. In the next few minutes, I will show you a few examples of what you’d be better off without in your abs workout:
First, straight leg raises. Interchangeable leg raises. It doesn’t matter, especially when the trunk is fixed on the ground. The same goes when you raise the trunk, especially when you lift your trunk keeping your legs straight.
The same goes for “simultaneous trunk and legs raises.” Something like this, or like this, or this, etc.
The same goes for scissors. In all of those exercises, abs are not engaged. We need to understand the function of the abs: it is to bend the spine. Look how it attaches to the bones: it stretches from the sternum of the rib cage to the pubic bone of the pelvis.
So now it’s apparent that the function of the abs is to bring these two points of our body closer together. When you perform an exercise in this manner, the muscles of the hips and pelvis do all the work, while the abs are just assisting in keeping the posture.
Our goal is to target the abs to make the majority of the load. When we do crunches, abs and obliques are getting 100% engaged when we raise only to 30-40 degrees, not higher. Here is how it looks. Exhale at the top. You can overload it by keeping your arms up. Don’t keep your arms behind the head, and don’t pull your head.
Try to do it 20 times and slowly, while concentrating your attention on the muscles! It will be hard to get up after!
Now let’s look at leg raises. Anatomically, we are moving the hip joint. But this is not the abs function, as we remember now. The ribs and the pelvis are not getting closer at all, rendering this exercise useless.
There are much better alternatives. Additionally, when we bend the hips, we heavily engage the iliopsoas muscle. We talked about it before; it may lead to vertebrae compression. This can cause all sorts of problems over thousands of repetitions, compounded with sedentary work, exacerbated with some excess body weight or extra weights.
This will not make for good workout results, and with time—not here and now—it will cause injuries and damage your well-being.
To give it due justice, many of you probably can ask if a majority of YouTube performers then suggest wrong abs exercises. Admittedly, it seems to be the case, but I do not know why it is happening. But it does not mean that we should blindly repeat their mistakes.
Just think logically about your workout goals and what you want from your body. These performers are genetically unique; they are lucky to have good “abs genes.” Probably their vertebrae discs are more resilient, and it is very normal diversity. Each of us is unique. And each of you is very special too.
You need to get everything through your own experience, but for a starter to intermediate, we all should stick to the safest, precise exercises that are well understood. At more advanced stages, one can experiment and add something new according to the stage, feeling the muscles and understanding the workout processes.
These people make millions of repetitions throughout their bodybuilding career, but you want to get to your goal faster and smarter by doing safe and targeted exercises.
Needless to say, in order to see a chiseled 6-pack, one needs to sort out the subcutaneous fat. So if some of you have a 5-centimeter shell in that department, let’s solve it.
It does not mean we should abandon our abs; work to burn it while keeping the abs workout routine.
I recommend now to look at my abs: why some people have skewed 6-packs, like mine here. See, one cube is lower than the other, and some have it aligned. For some people, these lines look like a Grand Canyon, and for some, it is rather floor tiles put together very tightly. The same goes for obliques.
Let’s now look at the anatomy of these muscles. The 6-pack is formed by the tendons that tie up the muscle across the abdomen, and the midline is shaped by the white line. These tendons determine how deep and wide your 6-pack is separated.
By the way, the tendons on the lower part of the abdomen are usually less developed, and that is why the lower abs are usually way less defined. And no matter a thousand more reps, it will never be equal to the upper part of the abs.
And lastly, it’s worthy to note: all abs muscles and obliques are very similar to all other muscles in our body. So it is very reasonable that they need to rest after each intense workout too in order to grow.
So stop wasting your time by doing abs 7 times a day, and there is no need to hammer it with 5-10 minutes of workout. I agree, it is a highly oxidative muscle group because it is always engaged to keep the body posture, but even so, let’s be careful not to overwork it in everyday workouts.
In the first 3-4 years of your training, all you need is 2 abs workouts a week with 4-5 quality sets.
To keep the video short (as it is probably less than half made it up to here), in the next video, I will show you which trainings are effective, spare your health, save your time, and deliver the results.
On this note, thank you for watching this video. If you find it useful, I recommend you subscribe. I will upload many more of such videos to this channel.
It was a pleasure for me to share this knowledge with you. Till next time!