Belly of the beast - Ab training for a tight and strong midsection

This is an article I really did not want to write, but the subject is one I am asked about repeatedly. People love abs it seems. It also seems, at least from the general fuckery I witness in the gym on daily basis, that most people have no idea how to effectively train or use their abs.

Expect a lot of this - I had to keep myself somewhat interested in writing this article

Expect a little bit of this - I have to keep the girls and gay dudes that read this interested

I hate ab training. I hate the term 'core'. I hate people asking me how they 'tighten' up around the middle. I hate a lot of things. However, sometimes we all have to deal with things we hate, so what follows will be my best effort of answering all the questions I hate, using lots of terminology I hate.

I also hate Star Wars, but I'd probably get on well with this guy

Let's get one thing out of the way right off the bat - having visible, defined abs (or defined any-muscle) is a body fat issue. If all you want is to look in the mirror and see a six-pack, you need to reduce your body fat. How exactly to do that is an issue for another day, but getting your diet in check, regularly lifting and maybe throwing in some conditioning work, in that order, will set you on the right path. Proper ab training will cause hypertrophy of the underlying muscles which will help with visibility to some degree, but laying on the gym floor doing hundreds of crunches does not a six-pack make (not to mention that crunches are a shitty exercise). While I'm ranting I might as well also throw out a (hopefully unnecessary) word of warning against any sort of low-effort-required miracle ab bestowing fitness contraption. Nothing comes without due effort in this game, if something is being sold to you on the premise that it is quick and easy, you can bet your ass that it won't do a damn thing.

If this stuff was easy, more people would look like this.

This article is going to contain a quick primer on what exactly composes the front mid-section of our bodies, a discussion on the actual use of having decent abs (apart from being pretty), a bit about posture, how to utilise intra-abdominal pressure (IAP) to stabilise the midsection during heavy lifts and finally some ab exercises which don't suck. That's a fair bit to get through so I'll stop airing my grievances with the world and start spouting some knowledge.

Mid-section physiology and function

Whilst 'core' is (unsurprisingly) not a recognised anatomical term, most that use it are referring to the entire front side of the mid-section. That is, the six-pack in the front (rectus abdominis), the internal and external obliques, transverse abdominis and serratus; yeah... anatomy. For ease I'll be using 'abs' or 'core' for the most part from here on to refer to all the above, I might also be able to bring myself to drop the inverted commas and accept these terms. The exercises we will focus on will hit all the front and side muscles, proper IAP will also utilise all the deep abdominal, diaphragmatic and spinal erector muscles for complete 'core' work.

There are better things to look at in this picture than the caption

The function of abs are to act as a brace for the middle of the body (along with the spinal erectors), they aren't there to move any weight per se - no one talks about their one rep max leg raise - instead the muscles of the mid-section act as a bridge between the upper and lower body, stabilising our structure where it is weakest. If you look at a human skeleton, there is the solid structure of the rib cage above and the solid structure of the pelvis below, between these there is just the spine, which seems pretty flimsy when you really look at it. Now imagine that skeleton has a significant load being carried in its arms, across its shoulders or overhead; that link between the ribs and the pelvis is going to need some extra stabilisation if it is going to stay solid, hence the need for some solid abs.

Strong, visible abs: providing stability whilst also letting people know you are better than them

Now some will think that all you need to do to keep that core strong is to put heavy weights on your back and overhead (in other words, lift heavy on the compound exercises) and there is no need to train the abs directly. Well, yes and no. Training heavy on compound lifts like squats, deadlifts, overhead presses and pull-ups is an extremely effective way to build strength and muscle in the core, however most trainees past the beginner stage need more. In a perfect world, heavy lifts would be all we need to train the midsection as we would get under a squat, engage the core (more on this later) and the load would be perfectly shared between the musculature, left to right and front to back, everything would be equally trained and we would be happy about life. Of course, this isn't a perfect world and most of us are shitty excuses for humans. As such, most of us have messed up postures with overly tight lower back muscles and hip flexors and weak abs; thus, when we get under a heavy weight, the load isn't shared equally, our weak abs don't engage properly, the back does all the hard work and we end up with under developed abs and a tight, achey lower back.

Overextension will leave your back in a world of pain and your lifts on a world of suck. Strong abs will help you stay in a neutral position and out of pain.

Without some properly applied abdominal work these imbalances will only perpetuate, which will limit potential strength gains through undermining core stability, probably leading to back pain (or even injury) and an ugly ass-out, belly-forward posture. That last point is a big issue - anterior pelvic tilt, leading to an overly arched lower back (or 'lumbar hyperlordosis' if we are talking in science).Whilst weak abs and overly tight spinal erectors aren't the only contributor to this issue (tight hip flexors and weak glutes are also to blame, see how to sort them out here); strengthening the abs will allow for the hips to be brought back to a properly aligned neutral position. Having the hips properly aligned means good things for appearance, getting rid of the over-arched lower back means you are no longer pushing your pot belly forward; it also means good things for lifting performance as a neutral spine is the strongest position for force transfer. A neutral spine is a strong and healthy spine. The hyper-extended lower back is also potentially an injury waiting to happen as the over-arching of the spine leads to vertebrae on vertebrae contact which, if loaded, can cause all sorts of terrifying sounding things such as stenosis, pars fractures and disc herniations (rest assured I'm not just pulling this information out of my strange mind; this is stolen from Dr. Stuart McGill, who is the man when it comes to spinal bio-mechanics). Therefore having strong abs will keep your whole mid-section solid and stop you shitting out your spine when you next try a deadlift.

Weak abs are regularly a contributor to the shitty situation we see on the left.

Boring scientific interlude over; back to the good stuff

Intra-abdominal pressure and why it matters

The concept and execution of creating IAP (also known as the Valsalva manoeuvre) seems to be lost on many lifters, but is probably the only thing that can live up to all those shitty marketing headlines that read like "try this one weird trick that can add kilos to all your lifts". Fortunately for you, this doesn't cost you anything apart from some time and effort in learning how to properly use your abs and diaphragm. Learning to do so will create stabilisation for the midsection in big lifts, greatly increasing force transfer (which means bigger lifts) and greatly decreasing the chances of injuring your back.

Entirely unrelated to the subject, but fun to look at.

To properly brace and develop IAP for a lift, start in a neutral spine position and take a deep belly breath, using the diaphragm to draw air down to your belly button. Closing the throat and not letting any air out, you should then contract all the midsection muscles hard, this includes the abs in the front, the obliques in the sides and the lower back muscles behind. Your midsection should feel completely solid; like you could take a gut shot from Ali and shrug it off like it's nothing (this is the in-his-prime, cocky dick Ali; not the current old, shakey Ali). This gives you the tightness, strength and stability that you need to boss around heavy weights and not the other way around. For a demonstration of IAP in action, check out the video of ultra-jacked man-monster Dan Green below; notice the huge breaths he takes before the lifts, forcing as much air into the lungs as possible, then holding it throughout the movement.

This isn't just applicable to squats, for movement to occur anywhere in the body, there is a degree of force transfer through the core. I'm not saying you need to practice power breathing as you warm up your rotator cuffs, but any time you are moving any sort of appreciable weight, take a deep breath and maintain tightness in the torso and you might well surprise yourself with the increase in performance.

This advice applies whether you are a jacked dude or a pretty lady wearing very few clothes

Ab exercises that don't suck (and the specifics on why some do)

First, a quick rant: the sit-up and crunch (a.k.a the exercises that people who don't exercise like) absolutely suck. For various reasons. First, they involve repeated spinal flexion from a poor position, which according to top spinal researcher Dr. Stuart McGill is a fantastic way to get yourself a herniated disc, even if we perform crunches perfectly, where the motion comes mainly from the upper back (not the lower) this is still a bad idea. Then we consider what we are actually doing, pulling the rib cage down towards the pelvis; this increases thoracic rounding (i.e. the desk jockey hunch) taking our upper back and scapulae out of position, which is shitty news if you enjoy moving well or being strong or athletic or looking good. Finally, the way the crunch is performed by the vast majority makes it mainly a psoas exercise, even if it is performed perfectly it is nigh-on-impossible to eliminate psoas contribuation. This isn't terrible in and of itself, however we tend to have overly tight hip flexors from our daily sitting habits and all this extra psoas training will only accentuate this, feeding into the problem of lumbar hyperlordosis that we mentioned above. So if you want a side order of potential back injuries, hunched upper back, and belly-forward-ass-out posture with your ab training, continue with the crunches. If not, read on.

The Pudz laughs in the face of your crunches

So what ab exercises don't suck balls and won't immediately hurt your back, ruin your posture, kill your gains and give you AIDS? In general the best ab exercises are ones that require us to use our abs to stabilise our trunk against an external force trying to flex/extend/rotate us, rather than using our abs to flex/rotate us. Confused? Allow me to explain. The whole abdominal musculature is a pretty complicated set of muscular fibres running in all directions; it isn't there just to pull our ribs towards our hips repeatedly, if it was, it would look like a bicep. The abdominal musculature is there to stabilise the torso against forces from all directions, thus to effectively train it, we stress it with forces from various directions and actively contract to resist these forces and remain in neutral position. Logic all up in your face.

Again, unrelated but pretty.

First, we have the plank. This actually a move you do see regularly performed in the gym, however as with many things, it is performed in such a god awful manner that the training effect from it will be minimal. The aim of the plank is to resist the extension of the spine which gravity is exerting on you by not letting the hips sag, yet look at most people performing this move in the gym and they will be in stuck in spinal extension, gaining stability from bone-on-bone contact and not using much of anything in terms of musculature.

A common side effect of great ab development is crippling narcissism and an aching neck from constantly looking down at your own midsection. 

Fortunately with a few tweaks (commonly known as the RKC Plank variant), the plank is a highly effective exercise. Most people are familiar with the standard plank set up; you are face down, toes and forearms are the only points on contact with the ground. To perform this advanced plank version you should position your elbows directly below or slightly higher than your shoulders, contact the quads hard to maintain locked knees, contact the glutes hard to maintain posterior pelvic tilt (thus training the muscles to counteract anterior pelvic tilt), keep the neck neutral, head looking down, pulling the chin back slightly to engage the cervical flexors (which helps correct forward head posture) and finally contract the abs hard whilst breathing with the diaphragm and pull the elbows towards the toes. Maintain all these maximal contractions throughout the exercise, if done properly the body will be absolutely solid head to toe and it will be impossible for the hips to sag; you may think you are pretty good at hanging out in plank position, but I assure you that upon trying this variant you will realise that a proper plank will smoke you in about 15 seconds. Similar techniques can and should be applied to the side plank to give us a solid anti-lateral flexion exercise to go with our killer anti-extension exercise in the RKC plank.

Next we have a great anti-rotation exercise, the full contact twist or landmine twist. You preferably need a landmine in your gym to do these, but they work pretty well if you just jam one end of a barbell in a corner. With your landmine or barbell + corner set up, put a light weight on the other end of the barbell, grab the very end of the barbell with both hands and lift it over your head. Keeping your arms as straight as you can throughout, bring the end of the bar slowly down to one side, then reverse the motion, bringing the bar back overhead and repeat on the other side. This can be a tricky one to get the motion of just from a description, so check out the video below (I also don't know why the fuck the guy is wearing a Spiderman mask, but at least he is training the movement right). The abs and the obliques especially will be forced to contract hard to stop you rotating at the mid-section when lowering the weight and to allow for the transfer of force to lift the weight back into position. This is a deceptive exercise as it looks easy, but you won't need much weight to absolutely hammer your obliques.

Pallof presses and variations thereof are another great way to train the abs as stabilisers. To do the regular version of this exercise, stand/half-kneel/tall kneel side-on to a cable with a D-handle set at shoulder height or a resistance band looped over a support, grab the handle/band with both hands, holding it against our sternum and position yourself far enough away that there is decent tension in the band/cable. From here press straight out to full extension of the arms, the tension in the cable/band will be pulling perpendicularly on your hands with greater leverage as you move your hands out, this forces your shoulders to rotate, if you have been following along with the general premises we are setting out here, you should know that our aim is to resist this rotation by contracting the abs hard, hold for a 2 count, then pull the hands back in and repeat. A variant of this exercise is to set up in an identical manner, but press the handle/band directly overhead, whilst keeping the torso straight, this will train the obliques effectively through resisting the force attempting to bend your torso to the side. Similarly, setting up with a rope attachment on a cable machine, facing away from the machine, holding the rope over your shoulders and pressing overhead hits the abs hard by resisting extension.

I apologise for this guy being neither jacked or tan.

A damn hard but damn effective ab training tool is the barbell rollout, this one actually gets some attention in the average gym, which is nice to see, but again it is an easy move to absolutely butcher. This is another move that most are probably familiar with, but for the uninitiated or those who perform it with awful form, this move consists of you kneeling (preferably on a pad) with a loaded barbell in front of you, which you then grip and roll forward. Throughout the move you should keep the spine in neutral, contract the glutes and resist any sagging of the hips; roll until your body is parallel to the floor (or as far as you can manage), at this point contract the abs, lats and serratus hard and pull back to the start position. The cool thing about this exercise is the fact that in addiion to a large degree of anti-extension work from the abs, there a bonus nice bit of training for the lats and serratus (the cool looking feather-like muscles on the upper ribs).

Steve Reeves rocking the Greek God look with some impressive lat and serratus development.

A class of exercises which hit the whole midsection hard, as well as countless other muscles in the body are weighted carries. These come in many flavours, from classic heavy farmer's walks, yokes walks, front/zercher carries and overhead carries (which hit all the abs), to one handed carries with the weight (dumbell/kettlebell) held at the side with a straight arm, in shoulder rack/clean position or overhead (all of which will smoke the obliques). Weighted carries are great exercises and a worthy addition to anyone's training schedule. They are also one of the simplest moves to describe. Pick up something heavy. Keep the spine neutral and don't let the torso bend in anyway. Walk. Get Strong. Look cool as hell doing so.

Pretty damn jacked. Very, very tan.

Last but not least, we have the hanging leg raise or as I prefer to call it, the hanging hip curl, as this better describes the movement that you should aiming for. Now before anyone accuses me of being a hypocrite as this is in fact an active spinal flexion exercise, which is exactly what I shit all over the crunch for being, observe a few key differences: due to the hanging nature of this exercise, there is an extent of spinal decompression, meaning that flexion puts far less pressure on the discs; the upper back remains extended and isn't forced to round, so increased thoracic rounding isn't a worry, and finally the hips are kept in posterior tilt to limit psoas contribution.

If you look like this, you can train however you want. No one is going to ell you that you are wrong

Those differences should tell you most of what you need to know about performing this exercise, but here is a breakdown anyway: Hang from a bar with whatever grip is comfortable, now contract the glutes and posteriorly tilt the pelvis to limit hip flexor contribution. From here slowly bring the legs up, thinking more about curling the hips towards the ribs and the knees towards the shoulders, maintaining the posterior pelvic tilt throughout; lower your legs and repeat. The straighter you keep the legs in this movement, the harder it will be and vice versa, so regress/progress as appropriate for your strength levels.

I'm not going to lie to you, I'm glad that's over. Don't ask me any questions, I hate this subject.

If you need me, I'll be in my happy place.