Everyone wants visible abdominal muscles in addition to a good chest. For some strange reason, abdominal muscles are seen as the hardest to train. The following ten abdominal training tips will hopefully provide some clarity and help you get abs that seem to be carved from wood.
Tip 10: Breathing
Often it is recommended to exhale when contracting a muscle, and inhale when performing the negative movement. However, with abdominal training, you can contract your muscles more powerfully by holding your breath. For example, try exhaling only when you have almost completed the exercise.
Tip 9: Concentration
Michelangelo didn’t sculpt his masterpieces with his eyes closed, so how can you think you can sculpt your abs with your eyes closed? No matter how difficult it may be, look at your abs during abdominal exercises. Not only does it increase concentration, but moving your head or shoulders up during certain exercises also provides greater resistance, allowing your muscles to grow better.
Tip 8: Body Fat
Everyone has abdominal muscles, but many people don’t see them because there is a layer of fat around the waist. On days when you’re not lifting weights, it would be good to do some cardio to burn fat.
Tip 7. Quality Over Quantity
For those who can do 1000 crunches in five minutes, congratulations, but I’m not really interested. Train your abs like any other muscle. I only do 8 repetitions of each exercise, and they look good to me. If you train your abs with high repetitions, you’re only training them for endurance, not for strength – and it’s the strength that you see.
Tip 6: Feel the Burn!
Although you don’t necessarily have to feel every repetition burn to know that your muscles are being stimulated for growth, it’s a good mental factor to feel some resistance. For example, you can add ankle weights, do sit-ups with weight on your chest, not just regular crunches but weighted crunches, or crunches with a cable.
Tip 5: Abs Cost No Money
Send back the stuff you bought from those infomercials at three in the morning. You don’t need special things to train your abs. The products you see on TV are good, but only to a certain extent. You often can’t add resistance. All you need is a mat and something to hang from to get nice chiseled abs.
Tip 4: Lower Abdominals
Leg raises are a favorite abdominal exercise for lower abs. Yes, at a certain point, the resistance is gone, but there are many variations and movements you can do to stimulate your muscles. For example, you can do leg raises from a bench to make a larger movement.
For instance, you can also try to do leg raises in a way that, at the moment your legs are ninety degrees up, try to touch the ceiling with your toes (imaginary, of course…) without lifting your shoulders off the bench. This combines two exercises and gives you an extra punch at the end of the movement.
Tip 3. Midsection of Abdominals
I haven’t done the standard sit-up in my ab training for a long time. Instead, I do an exercise for my obliques (side abs). You don’t need to train the midsection of your abs directly. If you train your lower and upper abs plus your obliques, your midsection abs will automatically be trained.
Tip 2: Upper Abdominals
I hardly ever do normal crunches anymore. I don’t like it when you can exceed eight repetitions without being able to add weight. Therefore, for the upper abs, I do a few sets of crunches with an overhead pulley.
The upper abs are probably the hardest to stimulate. It’s therefore important that you concentrate and focus on your upper abs during the exercise.
Tip 1: If You Want Them, Act Like You Have Them
It may sound silly, but after doing a set, pose your abs and flex them. Yes, I said ‘pose’! As long as you’re not seen by your parents or your spouse when you look at them in the mirror, you’re fine.
Posing tightens your muscles well and helps to make the separation between the muscles clearer, so they will look more defined.
