Fast 6 Abs Blog

Much has been written about how to tone your abs, or toning abs in general.  It is not really that difficult to understand some basics.

Abs definition routines should be low intense, use higher reps and sets, and contains more cardio type exercises.  They are designed primarily to burn fat tissues between your skin and the underlying abs muscles resulting in better muscle definition.  In fact, the fat is actually lost around the whole body, not just the abdominal areas.

Remember to incorporate aerobics exercises as part of your toning abs workout.  Some of the best are brisk walking, light skipping, jogging and swimming.  Treadmills, exercycles or low intense circuit training are also good.

 When you tone any muscle groups including abs, those muscles should already have existed, otherwise what is there for you to tone right ? Just common sense.
 
So before you look at toning abs, you have to have some ab muscles first.
 
If you have not got any ab muscles, have a look at some of our programs on Fast 6 Abs website or even on this blog.
 
Most fitness trainers never try and define their muscles while they are in the muscle building phase of their training.  So it’s not unusual to see a buildup of both muscle and fat during this stage.  Then on the last stage of their training, they perform toning abs exercises to trim away the fat leaving their ab muscles exposed.

Remembering that the goal is to reduce your overall body fat composition, you can help your case by reducing your daily intake of calories.  If you need help working out the calories of the food you eat, sign up to one of the online websites, there are quite a few of them around.

To recap, a program designed for toning abs should have more exercises per muscle group, twice as many or more reps or sets, have very low intensity, more aerobics based exercises and should have minimum rest between exercises. 

Keep the intensity low and try not to do any high intensity body building work while you are training for abs muscle tone.

Mmmm …. Yes it is a myth to those of you who are lazy bastards.

Okay so that’s a bit harsh but you cannot tell me that you were not excited by the challenge.  Certainly some of us will automatically see it as such (good achievable challenge), and it will get their juices going.

The critics and negative jerks amongst you will definitely say NO  – fast abs is not possible.  They will even bombard us with their 2 cents worth of bad arguments, citing 1000s instances of false references they know nothing about, as proof.

Proof or no proof, I am always keen for a good challenge. But, I also have the sense and experience to know that results in body building can be fast, if done correctly. Seeing it with my own eyes have changed my mindset in many ways.  No amount of ’realistic arguments to the contrary can change my views.

There is a huge difference between being realistic and that of being empowered to take challenges on. Most people who are being realistic tend to sit on their backside and watch the world go by. Certainly in my years in the industry, I have seen many people achieving the impossible. These are ordinary people like you and me.

Fast abs workouts are here to stay. Even I managed to do it several times in my life especially when I was young and vain enough trying to make myself attractive to the other gender.  Did it work? Yep they fell for it …

For those of you who knows me - I am not blessed in any way with good genes.  I am basically a hard gainer. My friends always tend to get results faster than me. Every time. But even I eventually got my fast abs, and got them fast.

Nowadays I prefer the steady 2 - 3 month long workouts. I just don’t get much buzz out of doing it any faster anymore. Besides my wife is always complaining about coming second to my fast abs training.

Maybe in 2010 I will get the itch I need to do a few muscle building challenges like this. Might even seek out a few challenges outside the body building industry.

Give it a shot, do your best and help us kill this myth about fast abs!

Here’s a typical ab workout from a friend of mine.  I can understand why he has opted for this kind of workout since he’s probably one of those people who we refer to as hard gainers.

His ab workout is similar to this routine. Trains 3 alternate days of the week. Every exercise is done to its maximum intensity to failure.  He did 5 exercises, doing one set each until he reached failure.

The exercises he performed are Ball Crunches, Side Bends, Leg Raises (Single & Double), Reverse Crunches and Waist Twists.  He choose to train every other day for 3 days because he probably needed to recover his heavy intense ab workout.

After 2 or 3 weeks, he then switched to low intensity for one whole week before he goes back to his normal intense routine. Because of the intensity he always make sure that he sleeps and eats well.

He trains every other day for example – Mon, Wed and Fridays.  He does light aerobics work on his rest days except Sunday when he performs no working out. 

Since his workouts are very intense he only does them for a few weeks of the year. For the rest of the year he will do the same routine but at medium intensity. Sometimes when he’s busy with work, he finds that he maintains his abs sufficiently with only 2 maximum intensity workouts a week.

What is your ab workout like.  Is it anything close to what he has above?

I often like asking people about the workouts they do and then sit there listening to them intently. 

In most conversations, the topic seems to evolve around naming the best abs exercise. When pressed further, people are not shy to tell us why in their opinion, a particular movement deserves the title of the best abs exercise. 

More likely they pick the exercise either because it either works for them or that it’s easy to do thousand of reps using it, or just that because it works the abs thoroughly according to scientific research. Those are all perfectly valid reasons.

Funnily enough the bulk of those who makes these remarks tend to be your average joes who works out a lot at the local gym and are not professionals. Only a few were actually qualified personal trainers or professional body builders.

Does that mean anything? Probably not. These guys also knows their stuff after all they live and breath iron week in week out. (I have made a point here to ask more professionals if I get a chance later).

So what is your best abs exercise and how do you choose an exercise to be the best exercise in your view?

For me, it’s very hard to go past the crunches as one of the best eventhough it only affects your upper and middle abs.  Most people like crunches because they are so natural to perform and they affect a lot more abdominal muscles than other exercises.  By varying the way you do them – twisting, ball, elevation or angle, you can get your abs exercised pretty thoroughly with crunches.

One of the best abs exercise that I cannot ignore will have to be the V-sit.  And yes my decision is not made because I can do them well.  It is more because, like the crunches, they affect most of your abs muscles and has been proven to stress the deeper muscles that are harder to reach.  It is a more complete exercise that the crunches.

Another one will have to be the reverse crunches because the way it stresses your lower abdominals.  It is not a complete exercise in my opinion but the way it affects your lower abs mainly gives it right to make the lineup.

So what does your typical abs workout looks like? What kind of routines do you us and what kind of exercises are included? Do you design your workout based on the areas you are weak in or do you based it instead on exercises that are your favourite and which you like to perform?

My abs workout keeps changing all the time, like say every 2 or 3 months.  It is a fact that after a few weeks, your body will have become adjusted to the intensity, causing your muscle growth to slow down or become stagnant.

This is also the main reason why body builders cycle their routines. The exercises I tend to use vary but some of them stays the same throughout the year.

For example, I am a huge fan of crunches because of the complete workout your abs will get from them. So while I don’t stop doing crunches, I often vary the way they are performed.  In my abs workout I sometimes I do floor crunches straight, sometimes with twists, and sometimes I do them on the ball.

My abs workout also don’t include a lot of exercises.  At the most I would only be dong about 4 or 5 exercises but I change them around regularly.