The Jewel of the Crown
Abdominals are
the visual centerpiece of the body. They tell everyone immediately what condition
you are in. They demand respect unlike any other bodypart because they convey
your discipline outside of the gym. Whether it is right or not, the public
respects a 150 pound person with defined abs more than the 250 pound monster
who hides his behind a tank top. And abs are even more crucial for competitors.
You can slave away for years to create a massive physique but you will be
dismissed from the second you step onstage if you are less than ripped in
the midsection. They are the visual indicator of how hard you dieted and prepared
for a show and can absolutely make or break your chances of winning. So with
all the importance of the abdominals, why are they treated in such strange
fashion? Short range, low intensity, high repetition, unweighted movements
are the norm for abs, but would never be considered for any other bodypart.
Odd theories abound as well, such as abstinence from moves that are believed
to distend the midsection, and even not training them at all during the majority
of the year! Now we also have a new wave of BS infiltrating our camps, that
of “functional training”, or “sports specific training”,
which demands that we train our abs by doing much of work on unbalanced objects
and with bizarre floor exercises. Let’s sift through the nonsense and
compose an efficient abdominal routine.
I used to think that abdominal work was unnecessary during most of the year.
“Let the diet take care of it”, was my motto. Honest retrospection
reveals that attitude was due to laziness and getting overly fat in the off
season. However, it would have continued except that I ran into a wall. My
abs were not improving. Diet was taking all the fat off, and they looked good,
but no different than when I was many years younger. In contrast, my other
bodyparts were developing as they should. It just didn’t look right.
What was wrong with me? I began to look at photos of great midsections, such
as Mohammed Makkawy and Pierre Vandensteen and compared them to my own. The
difference was actual thickness of the abdominal muscles. In short, they had
more mass. So I saw the problem with my abs, but how to correct it? What to
do? Oh my, I might try actually training them for starters. So I began following
my typical ab routines twice weekly during the off season, and three times
weekly precontest, instead of just sporadically. These routines consisted
of lots of crunches, both on the floor and machines, done with 20-50 reps
and about a dozen sets. I also did some giant sets precontest; five or more
moves back to back without rest. After a year, I revealed my newly constructed
abdominals! They looked….
Okay, I guess. Not outstanding. A little more development, but nothing like
I had hoped. So much for the power of visualization, as I had a clear picture
in my mind of what they would look like, and it was NOT how they turned out.
What gives? I had radically increased my workload, and swallowed my pride,
and yet the improvement was only slight. Do I continue with the horrid ab
work for another couple of years, hoping that eventually it will pan out,
or say screw it and return to my original ways? The latter was starting to
look like better sense, but I wasn’t quite ready to give up. There was
only one option left, and it was the most dreaded of all: I was going to have
to think for myself. That’s right, no reliance on common dogma or gym
lore, and actually figure something out on my own. Scary, but I had no alternative.
What it boiled down to was that I lacked mass. Not a hard thing to believe,
because as a very ectomorphic person, I lacked mass throughout my body. Why
would my abs be any different? And why would I think that high rep, unweighted
exercise would suddenly cause them to fill out? If I had those kind of genes,
I could just do isometric moves for my arms a couple of times weekly and have
twenty inch guns! Not the case. So if the aerobic class type of training wasn’t
doing the trick, I needed to apply the same logic to my abs that I did with
other bodyparts. This meant to find the moves that best stress the area over
the longest range of motion and allowed for the heaviest resistance to be
applied. I came up with hanging leg raises and crunches.
I took the hanging leg raises through the full range of motion: all the way
up until my toes touched the ceiling, and all the way down until they were
slightly behind my body. Those are hard to do by themselves, but I stuck with
it until I could eventually use a fifteen pound dumbbell between my feet.
For the crunches, I tried many varieties before hitting on a winner. All I
do is lay on a flat bench with my head slightly off the end, hold a dumbbell
in a pullover fashion grip against the back of my skull, and crunch upward
in explosive fashion. I trained them like I would any other bodypart for size
and strength: once every five days, with reps in the 5-8 range. It only took
a couple of workouts to realize it was working.
So now I had a winning formula, but the battle wasn’t completely over.
I had to deal with the nemesis of all intelligent trainees, the dreaded New
Wave Trainer. You know the type: the guy who loves to tell others how to train
in the latest fashions, who doesn’t seem to train much himself but loves
to profess his wisdom. I was bombarded with advice, all of which told me that
I was causing irreversible damage to my body. My abs would protrude worse
than a pregnant woman’s, for sure. My lower back would explode any day.
Symmetry? No more. Now my waist would be thick and hang off my hips. What
helped me to dismiss such advice was to first look at the source. Most of
the people advising me did not possess abs or sometimes, any other muscle
in their body. All the same, I kept close watch to see if any of the changes
occurred. What I found was interesting. Not only did the negative changes
not manifest, but the opposite did. My abs were crisp and delineated, and
could be sucked into a vacuum more easily than before. My intercostals and
obliques were pronounced and tapered better than before. And my back? It never
felt so good! I had an entire season injury free. I left the know-it-alls
to themselves, where they were balancing on slant boards and half balls, chanting
their doctrine to the masses.
Common sense also dictates a sensible approach to off season dieting. If you
get too fat, not only will you be unable to see your abs, which can be embarrassing,
but you run the risk of loose skin and wrinkles when you cut up. Bulking may
be useful as a teenager, but after the first few years of training, it loses
its value. Maintaining a manageable bodyfat during the off season, such as
10-12%, is much easier than dieting all that excess off. So no more binge
and purge for me; I keep the off season diet very similar to precontest, just
a few more carbs. Slamming down thousands of additional calories off season
doesn’t make much sense anyway, as your activity level is much lower
than during the insanity of ripping up, and building additional mass only
requires a few hundred calories daily over maintenance levels. Another fallacy
dispelled that benefited my abdominals.
So the moral of the story is that the abs are not unlike the rest of the body.
Forget all the junk about postural muscles and so-called stabilizers. Think
of the abs as you do your other bodyparts. Train them hard, heavy and brief
most of the year. No marathon, thousand reps routines done daily. Keep track
of your workouts to insure improvement and set goals for ab training to instill
enthusiasm. Hopefully this advice will make you look at abdominal training
in a new light. That new light will also shine down on ripped, corrugated
washboards that attract a judge’s attention! Train hard, and stay natural.
