While the biceps and other muscles stands out more for a person because they are generally exposed body parts, the abdominals don’t get the same exposure. However, when it comes to walking around with your bare midsection, people will not help but admire your well defined sculpted abs.

Some will take your training of this body part as an obsession or an expression of your vanity. What they say wouldn’t matter but, there is a lot more, well formed abs should tell other people about you. So what if you are vain, that’s not the worst thing that can happen besides no one in this world, I am sure, is not vain about one thing or another.

I hope you are training your abdominals for sports fitness or health rather than just to show them off, but that’s entirely up to you. The benefits of having a well toned body and abs are immense. Regardless of your primary reason for doing it, the benefits to your posture, general well being, health, self confidence and self esteem should never be under-estimated.

It is generally accepted, and there are researches which supports this viewpoint, that people with well formed abdominals are considered to be fitter than an average bloke. Whether they are really fit, and we wouldn’t know just by looking at a person’s abs is another story altogether.

People need to be accept the fact that being fat don’t look cool, period. Beer belly and love handles don’t look cool regardless of which angle the camera is pointing from. The only way of looking cool is to burn off the fat layers surrounding your mid section and developing the abdominal muscles that are hiding behind this fat layer.

The next time your so called well intentioned friends take the piss out of you for being obsessed with your abs training, tell them to go get a life. If anything, they should be supporting yuo and/or following you to do something about their pathetic looking abdominals.

One look at their abs told me all I needed to know. How can you show your abs if they are covered by layers of fat?

I bet they haven’t heard about the slogan – “abs are made in the kitchen, not in the gym”.

Someone was asking me the other day – “how can I grow my abdominal muscles the same way that I am growing my other muscles, and what exercises for abs should I do?”

Pondering on this question for a while, my brief answer to him is – you need to do everything that is required and not just do one thing. Training is one part of the equation but the other parts, and let’s face it – they are all equally important if not critical to your development, is (1) recovery through rest and sleeping and (2) your nutrition program.

Failure to do ALL of those things will make your exercises for abs routine, ineffective.

To which he replied – “but one person in my local gym eats everything he likes to eat and he trains just as hard as me but, he got the results and I don’t”.

To cut the story short – I nearly gave him a cuff around the ears. But, it is still a valid question which we will explore further, in another post. The bottom line of it is, you should never compare yourself and your training to someone else. You are build totally different in your physiology and behaviour. He may well be blessed with good genes but not you.

Copying someone’s training methods is only okay when you are starting out but the level you must always strive for, is to find out what works for you.

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.