What’s the Biggest Myth in all of Fitness? Part III
30 June 2006If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
Will dozens of sets of tricep pushdown oxidize the body fat that hangs off the triceps? No. Will a thousand reps a day in the standing or seated side twist mobilize the lard that lies atop oblique muscles? Not on your life. Yet for decades devices and methods and equipment have been sold (abdominal-related to near exclusion) that proclaim overtly or imply covertly that use of their tool or tactic will bestow a 6-pac waistline in no-time-flat…ripped, shredded and so fat-free that you could do the family laundry on your washboard. The makers of waist-waist-ers promote the myth that doing dozens or hundreds or thousands of reps diligently and repeatedly using their device or using their exercise methodology will deep-fry fat specific to the midsection: upper and lower abs, serratus, intercostals, external oblique muscles all magically will appear in crisp celerity after having burned through the obscuring layer of lard. The ab profiteers would have you believe that ab work “burns belly fat off faster than an ice cube strewn on a hot August sidewalk and all for just four easy payments of $19.99; Visa and MasterCard accepted – act now and we’ll throw in three bottles of Turbo Mega X fat flamethrower metabolic enhancer!” People get mad at me when I tell them this: human nature is such that we want to believe that there is an alternative pathway to the destination, that somewhere exists a tool or method that will allow us to by-pass biological reality. A get-out-of-jail free card that enables users to significantly lower body fat percentiles without facing dietary reality: body fat is manipulated not by exercise but by what, and how much, food and drink we shovel down our pie-hole measured against how many calories we burn on a daily basis. Learn it, live it, love it or be doomed to average at best.
So what is a person to do? How about working the ab muscles 2-3 times weekly for a couple sets taken to failure? We like leg lift variations – particularly done off an exercise bench of stairway that allows to legs to be lowered below the plane of the body. Another technical point: take the momentum out of ab exercising. It is easy to develop a rhythm when doing ab work that makes them easier – this is to be avoided! Let’s not use initial momentum to make ab work easier. Purposefully slow down the start of each rep and use full range of motion. Contract hard before lowering to start the next rep: better 10-reps done with full ROM and no momentum than 100 bouncing, rebound reps wherein the athlete uses momentum and speed to make the whole effort easier. Other ab favorites? Hanging leg raises uses “wings” that allow you to hang from the chin bar without using the grip. Put a twist on each rep to activate the external oblique muscles. Decline sit-ups are effective but it takes some practice to keep the hip flexors from firing. Care must be taken to keep the flexors relaxed otherwise you turn a great ab exercise into ineffectual waste of time. Again, purposefully using a slow start and feeling the exercise every inch of the way is the way to go. It won’t take a lot of work to strengthen and develop the ab plate but it will take a lot of work to melt away the layer of fat that obscures the abs from view. Better a few judiciously chosen impeccably executed ab exercises every three days than 500 sloppy reps done seven days a week.
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