Path: bloom-beacon.mit.edu!senator-bedfellow.mit.edu!faqserv From: timbomb@cs.uq.oz.au (Tim Mansfield) Newsgroups: misc.fitness,misc.answers,news.answers Subject: Abdominal Training FAQ Supersedes: Followup-To: misc.fitness Date: 22 Apr 1994 11:16:09 GMT Organization: none Lines: 452 Approved: news-answers-request@MIT.Edu Expires: 5 Jun 1994 11:15:52 GMT Message-ID: Reply-To: timbomb@cs.uq.oz.au (Tim Mansfield) NNTP-Posting-Host: bloom-picayune.mit.edu Summary: Information about Training The Midsection (Monthly Posting) Keywords: abs, abdominals, situps, love handles X-Last-Updated: 1994/04/05 Organisation: University Of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia Originator: faqserv@bloom-picayune.MIT.EDU Xref: bloom-beacon.mit.edu misc.fitness:21228 misc.answers:554 news.answers:18473 Archive-name: abdominal-training Last-modified: Apr 5 1994 Version: 0.9 THE ABDOMINAL TRAINING FAQ This FAQ is intended as an introduction to the basic principles of training the abdominal area, sometimes known as the belly or the abs. The creation of this FAQ was motivated by frequent questions on the topic in the newsgroup misc.fitness. The FAQ is posted every month to misc.fitness and misc.answers. It is also available via anonymous ftp from rtfm.mit.edu in /pub/usenet/misc.fitness/Abdominal_Training_FAQ. Those preferring to use the World Wide Web or Mosaic can use the URL -- http://clix.aarnet.edu.au/misc.fitness/abdominal-training.html Table Of Contents I. INTRODUCTION AND CAVEATS II. QUESTIONS QUESTION 1: How do I get abs like giant ravioli? QUESTION 2: Should I do lots of situps to reduce fat around my middle? QUESTION 3: How do I reduce the fat covering my middle? QUESTION 4: How do I exercise the abs? QUESTION 5: What's wrong with situps? QUESTION 6: What are good ab exercises? QUESTION 7: Is there a specific order I should do exercises in? QUESTION 8: How do I structure a routine? QUESTION 9: How often should I train abs? QUESTION 10: Should I do side bends to reduce my love handles? QUESTION 11: Gee, but shouldn't I balance my abs with my spinal erectors? QUESTION 12: Are there any special abdominal exercises during pregnancy? III. REFERENCES IV. CONTRIBUTIONS OR COMMENTS V. CONTRIBUTORS I. INTRODUCTION AND CAVEATS The information in this FAQ is based on Health For Life's _Legendary Abs_ booklet endless threads about abdominal training in misc.fitness and on the weights mailing list and sundry other sources. See the references list at the end for how to get hold of these things for yourself. II. QUESTIONS QUESTION 1: How do I get abs like giant ravioli? Getting visible abdominal muscles or "abs" depends on reducing the amount of fat covering the abs, see Question 3. Getting hard, lumpy abs depends on developing the underlying muscles, for details, read on... QUESTION 2: Should I do lots of situps to reduce fat around my middle? No. Exercising the area from which you want to lose fat is called "spot reduction". Spot reduction is now believed to be a myth. Research shows that fat is lost all over your body, not just in the area that you work. Situps are also bad for your lower back (see Question 5). QUESTION 3: How do I reduce the fat covering my middle? The answer comes in two parts: diet and aerobic exercise. DIET This is controversial, but most people agree that eating very little fat and lots of complex carbs (like rice, pasta and potatoes) helps ensure that you don't add additional fat. Then you have to work at using the fat you already have stored which involves... EXERCISE Again a bit controversial, but it's widely agreed that regular, moderate, aerobic exercise 3-4 times per week works best to burn fat that's already stored. "Moderate" because intense exercise burns glycogen not fat, so keep the intensity at about the level where you are beginning to puff a little. "Aerobic" means (very vaguely) the kind of exercise that requires you to inhale more. Some suggest that building more muscle through weight training helps as well, since muscle burns fat just by being there and moving your body about; so some weight training couldn't hurt and will probably help. Many misc.fitness people agree that exercise periods of more than 20 minutes work best. But note that the longer you exercise, the more prone you are to injury since your muscles also begin to weaken. Two things which help prevent injury are: a good warmup 5-10 minutes of light exercise to warm your muscles, try to break a sweat stretching cautious 20-30 sec stretches for every muscle (for an excellent source of information on the topic, see the Stretching FAQ). QUESTION 4: How do I exercise the abs? The abs are designed to perform one main task, to shorten the distance between your sternum, or breastbone, and your pelvis. The only way to do this is to bend your spine in the lower back region. In short, any exercise which makes you move your sternum toward your pelvis or your pelvis toward your sternum is good. To do this safely, the lower back must be rounded, not arched. QUESTION 5: What's wrong with situps? Traditional situps emphasize sitting up rather than merely pulling your sternum down to meet your pelvis. The action of the psoas muscles, which run from the lower back around to the front of the thighs, is to pull the thighs closer to the torso. This action is the major component in sitting up. Because of this, situps primarily engage the psoas meaning that they're inefficient and grind vertebrae in your lower back. They're inefficient because the psoas work best when the legs are close to straight (as they are when doing situps), so for most of the situp the psoas are doing most of the work and the abs are just stabilising. Putting the thighs at a right angle to the torso to begin with means that the psoas can't pull it any further, so all of the stress is placed on the abs. Situps also grind vertebrae in your lower back. This is because to work the abs effectively you are trying to make the lower back round, but tension in the psaos encourages the lower back to arch. The result is the infamous "disc pepper grinder" effect that helps give you chronic lower back pain in later life. There may be a way to do situps safely and thus exercise your psoas muscles. If anyone knows what it is, please let the FAQ maintainer know. QUESTION 6: What are good ab exercises? For the lower abs, in order of difficulty: 15cm lying leg raises vertical lying leg thrusts hanging knee raises hanging leg raises For the upper abs: ab crunches 1/4 crunches cross-knee crunches pulldown crunches 15cm Lying Leg Raises Lie on your back with you hands, palms down under your buttocks. Raise your legs about 30cm off the floor and hold them there. Now trying to use just your lower abs, raise your legs by another 15cm. Do this by tilting the pelvis instead of lifting the legs with the psoas. Make sure your knees are slightly bent. If you're big or have long legs or both, you should probably avoid this exercise. For people with legs that are too heavy for their lower abs strength, this exercise pulls the lower back into an arch which is bad (and painful). For reasons why it's bad, see Question 5. If you have this problem you can either try bending your knees slightly and making sure you keep your lower back flat, or just try another exercise. Vertical Lying Leg Thrusts Lie on your back and put your legs in the air vertically over your pelvis and your fists at your sides on the floor. Now, just using the abs raise your pelvis off the ground. If you have difficulty straightening your legs, that's OK, but make sure you're doing the work with your abs, not using the momentum of thrusting with your legs. Try pointing your toes at the top of the movement. Lie on your back with your fists, palms down, under your buttocks to keep your lower back flat against the ground. Try to raise head and shoulders off the ground. With your knees slightly bent, raise your legs 35 to 45cm off the floor. Your lower back should be flat against the floor; if not, bend your knees more or raise your legs higher. The exercise itself has four phases: 1. Contract your abs to raise your pelvis and legs so that your feet are pointing at the sky. 2. Thrust upward with your pelvis, pushing your feet skywards. 3. Lower out of the thrust, leaving your pointing up. 4. Lower your pelvis and legs back to the starting position. Legendary Abs II recommends these as safer than Lying 15cm Leg Raises. Hanging Knee Raises You need a chin-up bar or something you can hang from for this. Grab the bar with both hands with a grip a bit wider than your shoulders, cross your ankles and bring your knees up to your chest (or as close as you can get). Your pelvis should rock slightly forward. Pause at the top of the movement for a second and then slowly lower your knees by relaxing your abs. Don't lower your legs all the way. Repeat the movement using just your abs to raise your knees. Make sure that you don't start swinging. You want your abs to do the work, not momentum. It's important that you don't move your legs too far or your psoas muscle will be doing a lot of work and possibly causing back problems as in a situp. Make sure your pelvis moves, your lower back stays roudned, not arched, and that your abs are doing the work, not your hips. Hanging Leg Raises Just like knee raises except you keep your legs straight. This requires good hamstring and lower back flexibility, see the Stretching FAQ for details. Although Legendary Abs recommends these, The American Council on Exercise's Aerobics Instructor book warns that they have the same back problems as conventional situps. This makes sense since, like situps, the legs are kept straight and the hips move. For safety you should probably stick to leg thrusts and knee raises. If you do them, make sure your lower back stays rounded. There is an isometric variant done by gymnasts called the "L-Support", which basically consists of taking the leg raise position with the legs held straight at a level just above the hips. The position is held for 10 seconds. When you can complete this easily, try a higher position. The same cautions about back position still hold. Ab Crunches Lying on your back, put your knees up in the air so that your thighs are at a right angle to your torso, with your knees bent. If you like you can rest your feet on something, like a chair. Put you hands either behind your head or gently touching the sides of your head. Now, slowly raise your shoulders off the ground and try to touch your breastbone to your pelvis, breathing out as you go. If you succeed in touching your breastbone to your pelvis, see a doctor immediately. Do these fairly slowly to avoid using momentum to help. 1/4 Crunches Same as an ab crunch except that you raise your shoulder up, instead of pulling them toward your pelvis. You can do these quickly, in fact it's hard to do them any other way. Cross-Knee Crunches Like ab crunches, take the lying, bent-knee position, but this time crunch diagonally so that you try to touch each shoulder to the opposite hip alternately. At the top position, one shoulder and one hip should be off the ground. Pulldown Crunches Drape a towel or rope around the bar of a pulldown machine so that you pull the weight using it instead of the bar. Kneel facing the machine and grab hold of the towel and put your hands against your forehead. Kneel far enough away from the machine so that the cable comes down at a slight angle. The exercise is the same movement as an ab crunch, but using the weight instead of gravity. The emphasis is still on crunching the abs, pulling the sternum (breastbone) towards the pelvis making sure you exhale all your air at each contraction. QUESTION 7: Is there a specific order I should do exercises in? According to the Health For Life people, you should exercise the lower abs before the upper abs and do any twisting upper ab movements before straight upper ab ones. Twisting exercises work the obliques as well as the upper abs. QUESTION 8: How do I structure a routine? Try to do sets in the 15-30 rep range. Follow the two golden rules in Question 7. Pick easy exercises to start with and when you can happily do about 2 sets in a row of an exercise, try picking harder ones. Only rest when you absolutely must, so take a short (10-15sec) rest between two sets of the same exercise, but none between lower and upper abs. Try to take about 1 second for each rep, except for ab crunches which you should always do slow (2 secs/rep) and 1/4 crunches which you should do fast (2 reps/sec). QUESTION 9: How often should I train abs? Some writers recommend doing abs at every workout. Others recommend doing them however often you do anything else in other words treating them as you would any other body part. Health For Life's Legendary Abs recommends three or four times a week. QUESTION 10: Should I do side bends to reduce my love handles? Nope. Love handles (the pads of fat above the hip bone at the side of the waist) are fat and only shrink with a low fat diet and general aerobic exercise (see Question 3). You can't just remove the fat from that area on its own. Legendary Abs claims that side bends develop the oblique muscles under the fat and therefore make the fat more prominent, but some people feel that the obliques simply can't get big enough to be noticeable. If anyone feels they can offer an authoritative answer on this question, please contribute. QUESTION 11: Gee, but shouldn't I balance my abs with my spinal erectors? Thanks for asking. If your develop your ab strength without similarly developing your spinal erectors (the muscles that straighten your lower back), you will end up with strange and possibly damaging posture. A fairly good lower back exercise is hyperextensions, which are best done on a hyper extension bench, but can be done on a bed or ordinary bench with something (or someone) holding down your ankles. Lie face down, with your hands touching the sides of your head, your body draped over the edge of the bench and with your hips supported so your pelvis can't move. Slowly raise your torso to the horizontal position, but no higher. Keep your head, shoulders and upper back arched through the whole movement. Try to do a couple of sets af around 12 reps after each ab routine or after each back routine. Don't exercise them more than about three times a week. If you already do deadlifts that's probably exercise enough. The Back Lever Gymnasts do an exercise called a ``back lever'' which among other things strengthens your spinal erectors. This exercise is dangerous for many people, use caution! The exercise can be done on still rings, the high bar or a chin bar set a fair way from the ceiling. You hang upside down with an underhand grip. If you're using a bar, the bar has to be behind you so try hanging with the bar in front of you and walk you legs through. When you have the position, lower yourself, pivoting at your shoulders until your body is parallel to the ground (or as close as you can safely get) belly facing downwards and hold the position for several seconds. When you can't hold it anymore bring your self back up to vertical. Take care as you have to be able to get out of any situation you get into, so don't go too low on the first try and make sure you only do it over a crash mat or with a couple of helpers to catch you if you have to let go. If you're confused about the description, the HTML version of this FAQ available via the World Wide Web, contains pictures which will be below if you're using a graphical browser like Mosaic. Many thanks go to Keith Smith for patiently explaining the back lever to me. QUESTION 12: Are there any special abdominal exercises during pregnancy? Yes there are. The following brief summary is from Colleen Porter . Modifications for Pregnancy and Postpartum During pregnancy, abdominal exercises can help preserve muscle tone and take strain off the lower back. However, you might need to learn new routines, since most experts have counseled against lying on your back after the fourth month due to pressure on the vena cava, the blood vessel that returns blood from the lower body to the heart. The books "Pregnancy and Exercise" by Raul Artal and "Essential Exercises for the Childbearing Year" by Elizabeth Noble offer many suggestions for safely strengthening the abdominals during pregnancy. One exercise is the Rocking Back Arch: kneel on all fours and count to five as you rock back and forth, then return to the original position and arch your back. Repeat five times, several times a day. Postpartum moms should check their abdominal muscles for separation before starting any abdominal exercise program, because damage can be exacerbated by exercise if there is separation. Test this by pressing your fingers into the area by your belly button as you attempt to do an abdominal crunch. If you can put more than one or two fingers in between the muscles, they have separated and you will need to modify your crunches. Place your feet the same way, but cross your arms across the abdomen and squeezing the muscles together as you exhale and contract the abdominals, lifting only your head (not the shoulders). You may also use a length of material (such as old sheeting) wrapped around the abdomen and pulled across to achieve the same effect. III. REFERENCES Legendary Abs and Legendary Abs II are available from: Health for Life 8033 Sunset Blvd. Suite 483 Los Angeles, CA 90046 (800)874-5339 (U.S.) +1 310 306 0777 (International) +1 310 305 7672 (Fax) The Stretching FAQ is available "...in ascii, texinfo, postscript, dvi, and html formats via anonymous ftp from the host `cs.huji.ac.il' located under the directory `/pub/doc/faq/rec/martial.arts'. The file name matches the wildcard pattern `stretching.*'. The file suffix indicates the format. For `WWW' and `Mosaic' users, the URL is in `http://archie.ac.il:8001/files/CS-HUJI.html'." Aerobics Instructor (ISBN 096 180 16162) is available from: The American Council On Exercise San Diego (Address unknown, please contribute) To subscribe to the Weights Mailing List, send mail to Michael Sullivan at: weights-request@fa.disney.com You can also check out the archive of the mailing list at gopher://cyberdyne.ece.uiuc.edu/11/rec IV. CONTRIBUTIONS OR COMMENTS If you disagree with anything from this FAQ either from personal experience, or because you've read or learnt otherwise or if you have any tips, information or exercises to add or you notice any typos, please send them to the FAQ maintainer: Tim Mansfield The maintainer derives no money from maintaining this FAQ. Any requests to publish the FAQ in another form must be made to the maintainer. Provided that the maintainer derives no money from re-publication s/he reserves the right to decide where and how the FAQ is to be re-published. V. CONTRIBUTORS The following people contributed material for this FAQ: Tim Mansfield Nigel Ward Kevin Digweed Steve Cariglia Michael Sullivan David Will John Blaska Patrick Wai ??? Keith R Smith Colleen Porter