Archive for the 'abdominals' Category
Your abs get just too much attention, sorry guys and girls but the media, tv infomercials, your favorite exercise magazine, they all spend time focusing on that bit of flesh between your rib cage and your crotch.
sit ups, crunches, more sit ups, lots of those crunches. Hell the crunch machine in the gym i am based is the only one that needs maintenance each month!
Then there are those guys and girls who look simply awesome, yet you never see then sweating out 100+ crunches each day? How does that work?
1. You can’t spot reduce… if I had a dollar for the number of times I have said that… This means you can’t lose fat from a specific area by doing an exercise in that area.
2. Doing crunches just doesn’t get your metabolism fired up enough. You ain’t working enough muscle mass during a crunch to provoke your fat burning system in to doing enough work.
3. Doing the same movement over and over again, day after day, week after week, month after…. you get the idea… well your body gets used to doing that movement pattern, and it finds the most efficient way to do the movement, meaning if you where getting some kind of benefit from doing it, that benefit has now long gone.
4. Pelvic alignment… most of the time when we do crunches badly we end up working other muscles, namely the hip flexor muscles, which to be honest are shortened on most folk anyway from sitting on your arse all day. Anyway doing crunches makes the hip flexors even shorter, rotating our pelvis forwards, making you look like you have a pot belly.
5. When did our body ever need to lift our shoulders from a laying position and back down again 100+ times.
6. Did you see the film 300? Those guys got six packs from everything but crunches… I’ll find the video for you :o)
7. Most people are short of time, why focus all your training time of just working a tiny strip of muscle for more than half of your gym time.
8. The phrase “Abs are made in the Kitchen” is over used, but sadly it is so true. No matter how many ab crunches you do, if you are still eating that junk you’ll always have a layer of fat sat over the top of them.
9. Crunches hurt your neck, give you back ache and cause you to swear and curse… And at the end of all that has it really made a difference?
10. Six Second Abs, Ab King Pro, Winsor Pilates…. read the small print at the bottom of the page… there is a reason why they give you a diet plan to go with your favorite infomercial ab machine.
11. Girls like crunches because they make you look like you are doing the right thing in the gym!
12. Guys like crunches because they are a great way to look like you are doing some floor work before forgetting to do your stretches…. AGAIN!
13. Belly fat is dumb! It does not know where it is! Really! your body will burn fat (given the right opportunity) from the whole of your body. Do exercises that work the whole body, give your body the RIGHT opportunity to acheive this by working out smarter, not longer or harder or with exercises that really are quite pointless…
It is day 15 of the Elimination diet for me. So how has it been going.
The biggest thing for me is cutting out the coffee. I am finding it less of a problem day by day avoiding the coffee, but at times it really has been difficult.
The bread part has not been so difficult, and I have really managed to work around not being able to make a sandwich.
The Elimination Diet Cookbook has been a lifesaver to be honest, breaking my wife and I away from the tedious meat and vegetables meals, and we have tried a couple of different dishes including a slightly different style of omlete for breakfast.
Snacks have fairly consistently been fruit based and also natural yoghurt for the protein element.
So what has been the results: so far I have lost about 2.5kg not a huge amount, but significant in just over 2 weeks. The big difference is in the body fat percentage now down to its lowest in 18 months.
Dax is just finishing off the new Elimination Diet site, but if you want to get hold of it simply pop over to:
http://www.eliminationdietblueprint.com/
Oh yes and I would strongly recommend the cookbook if you plan on starting which you can get here
…about 5.
No really… just FIVE. I demonstrated them to one client the other day, it was the actually the first time I had included them in someones workout for the last 6 months.
I never include them in my own workouts, yet today my abdominal body fat measurement was the lowest it has been for about 18 months!
I watched about 5 guys and gals in the gym at lunchtime today doing their workout. Besides the usual grunting and groaning of the obligatory “bench press” with too much weight, the guys actually did some other exercises.
However these exercises seemed to be centered around their belly buttons (Obviously the center of THEIR universe), I saw more crunches performed today in one hour, than I have actually done in my entire career as a Fitness Professional!
If I could ban one exercise from the gym it would be the crunch. Once and for all lets knock this on the head, you can’t lose fat from your stomach by doing crunches PERIOD.
A Useful Abdominal Exerciser
09.06.08Most abdominal exercise machines, gadgets and devices are pretty pointless when it comes to actually providing adequate exercise. However there are one or two which I think are actually worthwhile, one being the stability ball which is probably the most used piece of equipment in my gym!
The other may surprise you. The ab wheel is actually a startlingly useful piece of kit and proves to be a great abdominal and core exerciser.
Don’t know what one looks like? Well it is basically a single wheel with two handles to hold on to. see pic below…
Whilst it doesn’t really fit the bill as a multi purpose piece of exercise equipment, like a stability ball or a set of dumbbell it does provide a progressive intensity exercise for the core musculature in your body.
If you don’t want to buy this item and you have a barbell with detachable weights then you can achieve the same result.
The exercise normally associated with this item is the ab rollout. Where off the knees you hold on to the handles and roll the wheel out as far as you can and then roll it back to the start position. To make it harder, lift yourself up on to your toes and do the same exercise.
