Gym Equipment For Your Abs

Using equipment in doing your ab workouts adds challenge and intensity in your exercises. There is a wide variety of gym equipment available, each with its own purpose, whether in targeting a specific region of the midsection area, or toning down all of the abdominal muscles at the same time.

The effectiveness of the ab workouts partially depends on the equipment which your routine demands. In the long run, a carved and lean midsection will depend on the movements and contraction which your ab workouts will give you, whether you decide to use equipment or not.

This variation on your ab workouts will add some zest in your routine. Medicinal balls are very versatile in exercises, and you will utilize one in this version of the traditional crunch ab workouts. Position yourself for the ab workouts by first lying on your back with both of your knees bent, and your feet flat and firm on the floor.

You are now poised as if you are doing a basic crunch. Instead of putting your hands to the sides of your head, hold a five pound medicinal ball close to your chest; make sure you have it firm and close to you as you do the movements in your ab workouts. Push your lower back close to the floor and flatten its arches, then take a deep breath and relax your body.

Begin the ab workouts by curling up your upper body just as far enough so that your shoulders lift themselves a few inches off of the floor. Make sure you contract the abdominal muscles as you make your way up. The tension should be focused on the midsection area, and not on your upper body or your shoulders. Hold this position in your ab workouts for two counts, or for four seconds, and then return to your starting position.

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The Easy Way to Show Off Your Six Pack Abs - Lose Your Belly Fat

Have you noticed that almost every member of your local gym has some sort of abdominal exercise in their routines and yet somehow, they never quite own those desirable 6 pack abs?

Have you been religiously doing your abdominal muscle exercises? Are your abs showing to your satisfaction? No? Why? The fact is that your ab muscles are one of the easier muscles to build. So naturally you would wonder why is it that so many people have such a hard to developing them.

You may think that you don't already own those six pack abs but the truth is that you already do. The problem is that your belly fat is covering those abs. If you have a body fat ratio higher than 12%, it will be virtually impossible for you to show off those sexy abdominal muscles. In order to get more defined abs, you have to burn off as much fat as possible. You will be able to own those rippling washboard abs when your body fat is less than 10%. So if you have fat on your belly, forget about abdominal exercises and burn off the fats first.

The second reason why you may not be developing great abdominal muscles is because you may be doing the wrong exercises and/or working out with bad form. You may have low body fat but if you are doing exercises with bad form, you are not going to see good results and you are also risking injury.

Let's take a look at some of the most popular abdominal exercises. People are packing in the gym doing hundreds of these exercises not knowing that really don't do as much for your abs as you might think. Don't believe me? When you do your sit up or leg raisers, place your palms on your hip on the area connecting to your thigh and perform the exercises. What do you feel? Those are you hip flexor muscles and those are the ones doing most of the work. If these are the muscles doing most of the work, how can you expect to get strong ab muscles??

So you decide your going to just do crunches instead right? That's fine but the problem is that most people perform crunches incorrectly too. In doing the crunch, you are supposed to squeeze your abs hard so that you are crunching them. Hence the name, "crunch." In order to squeeze your abs hard, you have to curl up like a prawn and breath out all the air in your lungs at the top position and then squeeze the muscles so hard that you feel a burn. That will take a few seconds to crunch out all the air before you lower to the beginning position again. If you are just going up and down rhythmically, it will be nearly impossible to do your crunches correctly. It is extremely hard for an average person to do ten properly performed crunches, no less hundreds of them.

Here is the bottom line, doing hundreds of crunches is not going to get you the results you are looking for. Start working on burning fat and doing your workouts in correct form. In no time you will start seeing your abs show.

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How To Get Good Abs In No Time At All

The one thing a set of good abs has is definition and detail. Whether you are male or female, getting a little bumpiness and detail in the large area of the mid section actually creates a focal point making the area look smaller. With no detail on the mid section the area does look larger than it is. It is an optical illusion, but a good set of abs, has that familiar 6 bump outline.

To get those abs, the first step is to have a thin skin layer around the tummy. If your body fat percentage is too high, the thickness of your skin will hide any ab work you have done. So, ultimately, reducing body fat on your body is just as important as having the abs in the first place. The whole project is about presentation. First you need to create the abs with a little resistance training like ab crunches and sit up's, but more importantly you will need to limit your calorie intake for a month or two and do some light cardio work in an effort to reduce the engorged fat cells in your skin.

Always drink lots of water when looking to build muscle. When you do the right exercises that stimulates the abs, what you do is create an anabolic environment in your body. The anabolic environment feeds the growing muscle nutrients and amino acids it needs to begin reshaping and thickening. If you are de-hydrated, those nutrients on a molecular level cannot travel as easily to the places it needs to go. Drinking lots of water especially during and after a work out will assist in the anabolic restorations of the muscle group.

Also, drinking lots of water, assists you when you are limiting your calorie intake. Before, when your body said, "I'm hungry" you fed it food, but often these messages and signals are not hunger but simply a discomfort or some other thing. Unfortunately, the majority of people respond to such bodily signals with food. By responding with water, quite often that is all thats required. Filling you belly with water also creates a sated feeling inside making it easier to avoid food until your designated planned meal time.

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The Quick and Easy Way to Tone Up Your Abs - Part 3

All About Abs - Ab Training

Exercises for Variety and Development Step by Step Abdominal Training Explained

Concept 1: How Many Times Per Week to Train Abs

Do you remember hearing somewhere that in order to get the abdominals you want; you've got to train them everyday? I know I heard that from several sources. None of those sources had super ripped abs.

Fact: Many of the people who DO have ripped abs train them 1-3 times per week.

Train your abs 1-3 times per week. I would recommend training them after a smaller body part workout like chest and biceps and abs, or shoulder, triceps and abs. You can do them on your off days as well. Try to avoid doing them with legs as it's a major body part. Try to avoid doing them first as you'll need your stabilizers to be 100% when they are used in other compound exercises.

You probably already know this... your abs can be trained a bit more frequently then most other muscle groups because of two factors:

1. The muscle density is different allowing for different recovery time

2. 99.9% of programs do not encourage you to train abs to muscular failure

You don't want to train abs to muscular failure for the purpose of this guide.

Concept 2: How Many Exercises Per Session

If you're like me, you don't want another session added to your workout that is going to add another 20 minutes to your gym time. But like any other muscle, the abdominals require a bit of stimulation but just enough to grow and change and become stronger.

Unlike other body parts, you won't be doing countless sessions for abs. In fact...

Use 3-5 exercises per session

That's all you really need. Use the schedule listed in this guide or just pick 3 different exercises and do 3-5 different exercises per session. You can vary your rest up to 90 seconds.

You've got to wonder why people train abs by themselves for 30 or more minutes at a time. That's crazy! And most of the people coming out of those "Ab Blaster" classes don't even have abs. They are doing longer sessions for a single muscle group then you ever need to engage in.

Simply put, 3-5 exercises will do just fine.

Concept 3: Using Cardio as A Metabolism Boosting Tool

For maximum fat loss, you should do cardio 4-7 days per week for 30-60 minutes (the amount is variable depending on your results). You could continue running or mix up the type of cardio you do (stationary cycling, stairclimbing, elliptical machines, and other continuous aerobic activities are all excellent fat burners without the high impact and joint stress of frequent running).

If time efficiency is an issue for you, you could perform high intensity interval cardio training and achieve very efficient results with even briefer workouts (20-30 min per sessions, or less, if the intensity is high enough) Once you are satisfied with your level of body fat and your abdominal definition, you can cut back to 3 days per week for 20-30 minutes for maintenance.

Concept 4: Advanced Techniques

Part of this guide is to ensure that you use all the techniques possible in order to achieve the results you want. There are two techniques you can use so that your routine doesn't become 'routine.'

1. Tempo Variation: Another way to increase the effectiveness of the training program is to focus on the tempo of the exercise. Tempo just means the speed of the exercise. For example, a 3-1-1 tempo means you'll take 3 seconds to lower the weight, then you'll pause for 1 second, and then you'll lift the weight back up in 1 second.

2. Variety: It's been said that your body will adapt to any routine within 5-6 workouts. By including many different exercises, it will be impossible to adapt. Not only will your body be continually challenged but the variety will help to ward of getting bored of doing the same things every week, every workout.

3. Multiple Angles: While the abdominals are classified as a 'single' muscle, that doesn't mean you can't work it from a variety of angles in order to achieve the maximum stimulation. Many times an individual will have their upper abdominals developed but are lacking any real "visual" development in the lower abs. Rather then focus on a section of the abdominals, this guide will encourage you to work the muscle from a variety of angles for the best possible stimulation.

Stay tuned for Part 4 that will flat out give you 6 months worth of ab workouts you can do.

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Learn the Truth About Weight Loss and Getting Great Abs

Debunking The Ab Myth

Ab training has been done to death but it's time to take another look. Why? Because people are still training their abs wrong so all that ab training information must not be doing the job.

1 - No Spot Reducing - Endless crunches will not melt away the fat from your midsection. It just doesn't work that way. And despite the "burn" of high rep ab exercises, you barely burn any calories while doing those endless crunches.

Your fat burning time is best spent elsewhere on more effective training. You also don't work the ab muscle intensely enough to develop it.

So endless high rep crunches fail on both counts - poor muscle building and poor fat burning. Two thumbs down as the cliche goes.

2 - The Abs are a Muscle and should be trained as such. You don't need high reps and lots of sets to work your abs. This just leads to overtraining.

Now, abs are a more endurance oriented muscle so slightly higher reps may be more effective. However, you should keep the reps at 20 or lower and work on increasing the resistance.

Yes, you should be increasing the weights on ab exercises, just like your other exercises. The stronger your abs, the better they will look when the fat is stripped away.

Ever see a really thin guy with a flat stomach but no abs? The abs haven't been trained and aren't developed enough to stand out even when the fat is stripped away.

3 - Don't train the abs - What the heck do I mean by this? Well, your abs get a lot of indirect work from other exercises so you really won't need more than a couple of hard sets of weighted crunches to work your abs.

Your abs are a factor in exercises such as squats, deadlifts, seated or standing presses, dumbbell pullovers, pulldowns, etc. Don't believe me?

Next time you work out, do a few hard sets of standing stiff armed pulldowns on the lat machine and tell me your abs aren't sore the next day. I did them yesterday and my abs are more sore than my back today.

If you want to develop a flat stomach with your abs visible, you need to treat your abs like a muscle and train that way. And you need to strip away the fat with a proper training and nutrition program designed around total fat loss, not trying to spot reduce through endless crunches.

Is there anything out there in the fitness world suffering from more misinformation that how to get abs?

The number of ab machines constantly coming to market is mind boggling. Especially considering that they aren't needed and won't give you the results that you want.

Let's set the record straight on ab training right now and give you the real information you need so you can say no to the next infomercial ab machine and yes to actual abs.

1 - Training your abs consistently will eventually give you the flat stomach or six-pack that you want.

No. It's not gonna happen if your abs are covered by a layer of body fat and doing endless sets of ab exercises is not the way to rid yourself of that excess body fat.

2 - Train your abs everyday for best results.

Again, no. Your abs are a muscle, just like your chest, lats, arms and so on. You should train your abs just like these other muscles, with progressive resistance and high intensity - then allow them to rest and recover. Never train your abs more than 3 days a week.

3 - You need to do hundreds or reps and feel the burn to get great abs.

Yep, again the answer is no. The abs a muscle just like I mentioned above. To get six pack abs you need to strip off the fat, but you also need to build the abs to get them to really pop out.

If the muscle isn't developed, you'll just have a flat stomach but no abs. The name of the game is progressive resistance for sets of 8 - 20 reps, just like your other muscles.

4 - Train the abs with lots of sets and high reps to burn off stomach fat.

You guessed it. This is also false. Spot reduction just isn't going to happen as much as we'd all like it to. You can't burn fat on your stomach by doing endless crunches.

You need to put together a proper weight lifting program, nutrition plan, and cardio in order to rid your stomach of that stubborn layer of fat and bring yout your abs.

Gregg Gillies

Gregg Gillies is a speaker, consultant, fat loss expert, trainer and author. He teaches fitness via his articles, books and courses at his web site http://www.buildleanmuscle.com . He is the author of two books: Complete information on his books, along with lots of free articles are available at his site. And while there, don't forget to sign up for his free newsletter, "Fit Physique".