9 tips for getting a solid six-pack

 

9 tips for getting a solid six-pack

1 Keep it regular

If, in the past, you've tended to ignore your training routine completely for a couple of weeks and then tried to make up for this with a three-hour session in the gym, then it's a fair bet that you haven't yet seen the results you'd like.

A far better plan is to do several short sessions a week - a training session doesn't need to take more than 30-40 minutes - as this will keep your muscles stimulated and growing all the time. It will also prevent the inevitable injuries that come with overdoing your training after too long a lay-off.

2 Relax, man

In between training sessions, make sure you get your rest because it's during this time that your body recovers from its exertions and, by repairing itself, becomes stronger than it was before. So always leave a rest day between workouts and don't be fooled into believing that by training every day you'll be getting stronger, because without the necessary recovery time you won't give your muscles a chance to grow.

Also, try to cut stress out of your life, because this will have a negative effect on your muscle growth as well.

3 Mix it up

Your body is an extremely cunning machine. If you try and force it to perform the same movements over and over again, it simply adapts to the stresses placed upon it and becomes very efficient at performing those moves.

You don't want this to happen. Why? Because when your body becomes good at doing a movement it stops promoting new muscle growth. That's why you constantly need to keep surprising your body with new exercises.

4 Keep upping the ante

As well as doing plenty of different exercises, it's also important to keep making the exercises harder all the time to stimulate muscle growth as you get stronger.

If you are training regularly, you should aim to increase the resistance you use by around ten per cent every four weeks. That means pushing more weight, not doing more reps. If you simply increase the reps all the time until you can do hundreds of crunches, your endurance will improve but not your strength, and it's the strength-based muscles that are biggest, not the endurance-based ones - think sprinters versus marathon runners.

5 Work your entire body

If you want to develop strong abs, you should work your abs, right? Well, yes, but it's also important to train the rest of your body as well, especially the big muscle groups such as your legs, glutes and back. And that's not just because having a set of ripped abs on a scrawny frame would look weird.

By training the large muscle groups using compound exercises, such as squats, deadlifts, rows and bench presses, you release lots of muscle-building hormones into your system, and this will have a positive impact on your abs as well as the rest of your body.

Extra muscle on your body will also help burn more fat because you'll torch calories simply by supporting your extra body mass.

6 Save your abs till last

When you do an all-body workout, start with the big muscle moves and save your abs-specific exercises until last. This will prevent you from exhausting your core muscles - the muscles around your abdomen - early on, as you'll be using them to stabilise your spine during heavy lifts, such as squats, deadlifts and bench presses.

7 Focus on every move

It's tempting to rattle through each set of exercises until you've done the required number, and then sit back and congratulate yourself on a job well done. But are you really getting the maximum benefit from every move you do?

When you do any exercise, you should focus on the muscles you are targeting and make sure that they are performing most of the work. At the top of the move, squeeze your muscles as hard as you can to ensure the maximum contraction. It will make each set of exercises feel much harder, but the benefits will be plain to see.

8 Dont let gravity get you down

An awful lot of abs exercises involve lifting your body off the floor, and often people when they're working out will put all their effort into the lifting phase and then let themselves drop back down to the start like a sack of spuds. By doing this, you're only performing half of the exercise.

The negative portion of the move - where you lower back down to the start - is the part with the most potential for muscle growth, so make sure you take at least three seconds to perform this part and don't let gravity do the work for you.

9 Keep up the cardio

Cardio exercises, such as running, swimming or cycling, are often seen as the enemy of muscle building. It's true that excessive cardio can eat away at your hard-won muscle, but if you keep your sessions short and intense then you can get the fat-burning benefits of cardio without any significant muscle loss.

The best way to do this is with intervals, where you do short bursts of intense exercise followed by longer recovery sessions. An example would be 30 seconds of sprinting followed by two minutes of jogging repeated for only ten or 15 minutes.