5 Ways to Annihilate Your Abs!

5 Ways to Annihilate Your Abs!

Trammell's Health & Fitness Tips - Health, Fitness, Nutrition & Training Tips to Keep you Healthy and Motivated

1. ADD WEIGHT - Sets of 50 are great for building endurance but do little to build strength or shape in your abs. Because these muscles are engaged all day to keep your vertical, solely doing high rep work is going to do very little to instigate change. Just like with any other muscle group, you need to change up the resistance and rep ranges. In some workouts, you can do 20 or more on your ab exercises. In others, drop to the 10-15 rep range or even below 10 by adding resistance in the form of a medicine ball, weight plate, bands or even a cable with a rope attachment.
   
   
2. STICK TOGETHER - Straight sets, in which you do one set of an exercise, rest, do another set of the same exercise, rest and then eventually move on to another exercise, is the most basic way to train. Instead, try doing all of your exercises in a circuit fashion by incorporating tri-sets or giant sets. The benefits? You will burn more calories, finish your workout quicker and most important, increase the intensity of your workout.
   
   
3. TRY TABATAS - Tabata training is a type of interval training developed by a Japanese exercise scientist named izumi tabata. To do a tabata ab workout, pick 3 exercise one that targets upper abs, lower abs and obliques. For each exercise, do cycles of 20 seconds of work alternating 10 seconds of rest, and rest a minute between exercises. Training this way not only exhausts your abs but also helps carve away the fat.
   
   
4. DOWN TO THE CORE - As a personal trainer in Portland, I often utilize the plank with my clients. The plank is important to the overall aesthetic of your abs because the muscle it targets is responsible for keeping the showcase muscles of your muscles of your abs tight and drawn in. To infuse your next ab workout with an element of fire inducing pain, finish your ab workout with 3-5 sets of planks held for 1 minute or longer each.
   
   
5. SPEED IT UP - A study conducted in spain showed that when subjects did the positive part of a crunch as quickly as possible, they used more muscle fibers in all areas of the abs, especially the obliques. This essentially turns the crunch into an exercise that targets not just the main abdominal muscle but also the obliques. And because the goal of any exercise is to target as many muscle fibers as possible, going faster in this way makes the crunch more effective.

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