Workouts: Ab Workout Mistakes You Must Avoid

By Trina Remedios

If your abs are not yet showing after a strenuous workouts, something is not right. Fitness instructor from Kolkata and our fitness expert, Arnav Sarkar gives you four good reasons for no abs.

Ab Workout: What you ought to know about Abs

The simple science behind six pack abs is that they exist in everybody. It’s just when you start putting on more body fat that these abs disappear. A combination of two major muscles transversus abdominis and rectus abdominis muscles make up what we consider to be our 'abs' zone.

These muscles are buried under the front and side of torso mucles and exist around your midsection like a girdle. Now, if you ate a healthy diet comprising of lean proteins, balanced carbs and less, yet good, fats, you would enter a zone with minimal superficial body fat, and your muscles would become visible, resulting in six pack abs.

Ab Workout

Doing only high reps:

“High reps are great for muscular endurance, but not necessarily for abdominal development,” explains Arnav. “If you want rock hard abs, then include some work in the low to moderate rep range. Try hanging leg raises, dragon flags, windmills, etc for sets of 5-12 reps and feel your abs getting tighter.” The abs will appear gradually with a mix of high reps and low reps too.

Not including a rotational movement:

Arnav makes a crucial point about rotational exercises, “Your abs don’t just work when you perform a sit up, they also work when you rotate sideways, so why not include a rotational or bending movement to hit the obliques better. Good choices in this case include Russian twists, side bends, windmills, twisting crunches, etc.”

Ignoring heavy compound movements:

“While you train your abs directly with the crunches and the sit ups, your abs also work hard when you perform a heavy military press or a heavy squat. Go heavy with these moves to work your core harder, and get better results,” suggests Arnav. It is important to strength the core to avoid workout or sports injury.

Using fancy ab gadgets:

We tend to go over board to get wash board abs, but Arnav says not to fall for long claims. “Be honest, did you ever buy one of those fancy ab gadgets that they advertised on those TV shopping infomercials? Atleast I fell for one of those silly gadgets once. Only once! The fact is that any product that claims that you can get great looking abs with only three 10 minutes workouts a week, and no diet control, is wasting your time. Great abs require a lot of hard work, and take a lot of diet control to be unveiled.”

Why crunches are not enough for abs

For six-pack abs one needs to strengthen the abdominal muscles and lose body fat. Unfortunately there is no escaping cardiovascular exercise and weight (or resistance) training to lose weight in a healthy way.

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