Normally, when people workout in order to burn belly and get six pack abs they focus on traditional exercises such as sit-ups, crunches, leg lifts, and planks. Others take a more general approach because they know that the most important thing they can do is to get rid of belly fat. Only then will their abs muscles show. This is all good and can help you achieve your goals.
However, there may be other, more advanced methods to make you abs training more effective. I’ve just read an interesting and thought provoking article by Dr. Kareem Samhouri, creator of the Double Edged Fat Loss program and a Doctor of Physical Therapy in which he spells out a new strategy for six pack abs workouts that he has devised and one which he shares with his clients at his practice.
I want to bring you this article in full here. Enjoy…
The New Method For Six Pack Abs
by Dr. Kareem F. Samhouri, CSCS, HFS
Neuro Metabolic Fat Loss Expert
Slow abs training is now over.
It’s time for a new era.
Training for six pack abs takes strategy. Understanding how to properly utilize your abs as stability muscles in all exercises will quickly improve your six pack abs training results.
However, in order to be able to utilize your abs to their full capacity, you have to first know how to recruit them. This is where most people get lost… at least until now.
I’ve developed a sure-fire method for ‘turning your abs on’ with each and every exercise you do, beginning after the first 5 minutes of your exercise program.
There’s no way around it, and you simply cannot fail. I’m more than excited to share this method with you – are you ready to see major change in a very short period of time?
I’m going to teach you exactly what to do if you want to ‘activate’ your abs in every exercise you do, throughout every workout. If you think about it, this is going to make ab rollers feel like dinosaurs, and crunches seem as silly as those electrical stimulation devices you see on TV.
You will literally be working your abs out for every rep of every exercise you do, and your midsection will be begging for a break when you’re all done. Your six pack abs results are about to improve exponentially.
- Step 1 – Fatigue out your extremities completely.
- Step 2 – 100 reps glutes
- Step 3 – Fatigue out your extremities completely.
- Step 4 – 100 reps abs
- Step 5 – Rest 4-5 minutes and repeat, involving more of your trunk musculature with each exercise of each circuit.
Let’s take a look at each one of these steps in greater detail, with an explanation for each.
Step 1 – Fatigue out your extremities completely.
This goes against most modern teachings of ‘proximal stability before distal mobility’ and should be used with caution. The reason people usually teach you to work trunk muscles first is so that your little muscles (muscles in your arms and legs) won’t give out and collapse on you when you’re lifting a heavy weight.
However, we’re taking the neurological signal from our trunk, spreading it to our extremities, and then never bringing it back to our trunk. In this step, what we’re doing is depriving our arms and legs of oxygen, forcing blood out of our extremities, and producing lactic acid there quickly.
Since our bodies will hold onto our blood and oxygen regardless, it’s a strong bet that this oxygen is moving centrally, or towards our trunk. In a sense, we’ve now supersaturated our trunk muscles with blood, nutrients, and oxygen.
We are primed for Step 2.
Step 2 – 100 reps Glutes
Your glutes and lower abs are a pair. If you’re like 99% of people out there, you have a difficult time recruiting your lower abs. By focusing on glute activation exercises second, once we have the oxygen present to endure more reps, we are actually targeting our lower abs, or pre-activating them for what’s to come.
Step 3 – Fatigue out your extremities completely.
It’s time to shift focus back to our arms and legs, but this time our abs are working to stabilize us, reduce risk of injury, and become a part of all exercises. We are now working our abs involuntarily, but driving more oxygen and blood to them at the same time through the aforementioned method above.
Step 4 – 100 reps abs
Ok, so it’s time to test our ability, with no rest whatsoever, to really challenge our abs to hit the next level of strength and endurance. Because we have supersaturated them with oxygen, our aerobic abs fibers (about 80% of the abs fibers the average person has) are primed for the best performance of our lives.
Now it’s time to really challenge ourselves to do the impossible, and force ourselves to go above and beyond what we ‘know’ to be our limits. It’s time for the new era for our abs.
Step 5 – Rest 4-5 minutes and repeat, involving more of your trunk musculature with each exercise of each circuit.
Adequate rest is necessary to derive as much from the following set. By involving more of our trunk muscles with each successive set, we are essentially teaching our bodies to always activate trunk muscles when using our extremities.
This is a good habit to form to reduce risk of injury, and it also serves our greater purpose of teaching our bodies how to turn every exercise we do into an abs exercise at the same time.
Why spend your days exercising body part after body part, isolating one muscle group after the next? Why spend so much time in the gym? It’s no longer necessary. It’s time that you learn how to exercise as much of your body as possible, and to do it quickly.
=end of guest article=
For more on Dr. Kareem read a full interview he gave to WorldofDiets here: Dr. Kareem Fat Loss interview. For another article contribution by Dr. Samhouri read How Muscle Sequencing Works.
