Heavy Resistance for 6pac Abs
Oct 15, 2010
While mainstream fitness enthusiasts have progressed in the gym—incorporating balance and stability exercises to strengthen their core—most are still hung up on doing hundreds of sit-ups or crunches everyday to lose belly fat and get six-pack abs. They often fall victim to two wellmarketed myths: 1) You can reduce belly fat by training your abdominals and 2) Abdominals should be trained diff erently than the other muscles in your body. The truth is that your abdominals apply to the same scientifi c principles of every other muscle group in your body. Many people still believe the outdated fi tness myth that if they do crunches with high-repetition and low-resistance every day, they can reduce abdominal fat. The erroneous belief behind fat reduction is that if you train a muscle that is covered by body fat, the fat will go away, turn into muscle, and get “toned.” Contrary to popular belief, there is no way to reduce only abdominal fat with abdominal training exercises. If you could, everyone who chewed bubble gum would have skinny faces. The other myth is that abdominals should be trained differently than other muscles in the body and do not apply to the same scientifi c principles. Many believe that abdominal muscles should be trained everyday with high repetition sets and no resistance. One main reason why people, especially women, do not use resistance when training their abdominals is because they do not want to get too muscular. They want to “tone” their muscles not build muscle. Yet, there is no such thing as toning a muscle. It is an erroneously used marketing term that helps sell magazines and exercise equipment. Muscles can either hypertrophy (grow) or atrophy (shrink). This applies to all muscles, including the abdominals. The purpose behind training the abdominal muscles with resistance is to stress them to the point where they must adapt to meet the unaccustomed demands. This is called the overload principle. The human body is involved in a constant process of adapting to stresses or lack of stresses placed upon it. When you stress the body in a manner it is unaccustomed to (overload), the body will react by causing physiological changes (adaptation) to be able to handle that stress in a better way the next time it occurs (1). These concepts make sense to the average fi tness enthusiast when it comes to training other muscle groups; i.e., they would not expect their arms to look any better if they performed 300 curls with a broomstick seven days a week. Therefore, strength training 2 – 3 times a week, with moderate to heavy resistance, moderate repetitions, rest in between and a variety of exercises to target diff erent areas applies to the abdominals as well as all other muscle groups. For example, cable crunches on a resistance ball, cable rope crunches, hanging abdominal raises with dumbbell between legs, cable rotations, and seated abdominal crunches are the types of exercises that will yield the desired results. References 1. McArdle, WD, Katch, FI, and Katch, VL. (2000). Essentials of exercise physiology (2nd ed.). Baltimore: Lippincott, Williams, & Wilkins.