Got abs?

This post comes from a good friend of mine, Marlene Harris. I post things of hers and welcome her informative inputs on things fitness and health.

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Summer is coming (I promise!) and if you're sporting a ONE-pack instead of a SIX-pack, this guest article is right up your alley. This is from my friend and colleague Kevin Stock (that's a pic of him below)... And yeah, as you can see, the dude knows exactly what he's doing in the gym AND in the kitchen. This kind of physique doesn't happen by accident. His info can help you YOU do the same. Enjoy the article!

Nick Nilsson

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Two Tricks to Getting Abs that POP By Dr. Kevin Stock, author, Magazine Abs

 

When it comes to TRULY getting abs (I'm talking REAL ABS - that pop out) there are TWO MISTAKES that EVERYONE makes. Master these two things and you will have a rippled midsection in no time.

1. CARBOHYDRATES: How efficiently and effectively your body utilizes carbohydrates is perhaps the most important nutritional aspect to getting seriously cut (i.e. really low levels of body fat). So unless you are already sub 7% body fat (if you’re a guy, 15% if you’re a gal). In this case - skip to point #2. Strategically managing and manipulating your carbohydrate intake is essential to your diced abs quest. Without smothering too much of my science nerd on you, there are a couple of "Sciencey" words we need to know.

- Insulin Sensitivity - we want our cells to be as sensitive to insulin as possible. This is the opposite of insulin resistance (characterized by pre-diabetes and diabetes). Insulin resistance and diabetes is prevalent due to the fact people have no idea  how to manage their carbohydrates. Oh, and it's no coincidence that diabetes and obesity are directly correlated. All we need to know here is, the higher the insulin sensitivity, the better the cells uptake glucose, the better your body utilizes carbohydrates ' the better you look.

- Nutrient Partitioning - this is directly related to insulin sensitivity, and is a term describing how you are directing your nutrients. Are they going to fat stores? Or are you sending them to muscle tissue to replenish glycogen and stimulate protein synthesis? With a properly structured nutrition and training strategy, you can maximize nutrient partitioning shuttling essential nutrients to muscular tissue and away from adipose (fat) tissue. The way I train people to optimize carbohydrate usage allows one to eat carbohydrates at optimal times to maximize insulin sensitivity and nutrient partition.

2. ABDOMINAL TRAINING: I have no clue when it became commonplace and socially acceptable to train abs like a wussy. If people trained their chest or biceps or legs like they train abs they would be laughed at. Imagine just doing biceps curls with your arms -no weights - just curling your forearm. Ludicrous, I know -and you wouldn't expect much bicep growth, would you?

Honestly, lying on the ground and repping out bodyweight crunches for sets of 5,000 isn't going to get you the abs you want. HERE is the key formula (that is, after you get rid of the overlay of body fat via sound and strategic nutrition):

RESISTANCE + Time Under Tension = POPPING AWESOME ABDOMINALS

Add  RESISTANCE to where you can only do 8-10 reps per set, and increase T.U.T. = Time Under Tension. And with this process we are creating POPPING AWESOME ABDOMINALS. To bring it all together, when you eat strategically and combine it with a strategic training protocol you get results. It's as easy as that.

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Nick Nilsson’s concluding comments: Just to quickly recap, I'm in total agreement with Kevin on the two points in his article. Managing your carb intake is critically important...even more important than fat intake (assuming you're not eating bacon three meals a day, of course!). And I've been preaching about using resistance for abdominal training literally for the last 15 years (probably more). In order to develop a muscle (abs included), you MUST work that muscle with resistance. Simple as that.

The abdominals are actually primarily fast twitch muscles that respond best to resistance and low to moderate rep ranges, NOT the high-rep endurance training that most people tend to default to. The final point I want to make is this...when you develop your abs with resistance, you'll actually be able to SEE them even at higher body fat levels.

Marlene’s Concluding Note: While the above tips seem simple enough, from where it sit, it’s the primarily the nutrition part that keeps us from developing that coveted six-pack. If you just can’t live without chips, party foods, desserts, pastries, candy, or if you can’t live with much more modest portions of potatoes or rice, breads, ect., it’s not going to happen, period. We tend to get hung up on eating our way through life to enjoy it, not stopping to consider there may be other forms of enjoyment out there for us if we simply modified our thinking and our habits a bit.