Kung Fu Abs
Date: Thurs, 31 Mar 2005
First off, if you’re one of the dozens and dozens and dozens of people worldwide who feverishly requested that I move forward at once and create the eBook on my 5 Rules of Survival, there’s good news.
I’m going ahead with the eBook.
As I said last week though, there’s a bit of doing involved in this, so please be patient. I do promise it’ll be worth the wait. I just bought a book on creating ebooks. That way, not only will it have strong content, but it will have a decent look to it, and it will be something my subscribers won’t be embarrassed to pass on to friends and family.
Many of the people who emailed me requesting their copy said they wanted to share it with other people, so the least I can do is put it in proper order.
Onward.
Todays’ topic is exercise, specifically, how to get the mid-section in shape. I have a pretty strong set of abs and I’m glad I do because some of the people I’ve sparred with over the years didn’t seem to have any reservations about booting me in the stomach. It's almost as if they were trying to. Hey, wait a minute . . .
So then, if you’ve never had this done to you, let me tell you, it’s an unforgettable experience. It hurts like hell, which is bad enough, but the truly evil part is that YOU CAN’T BREATH!
Also, the ordeal seems to just go on and on and on . . .
Basically, you’re standing there bent over clutching your mid-section making a weird uunnnggghhh noise – if you’ve gone through this, you know exactly what I’m talking about. And while you're making that noise, you're thinking to yourself, "Wow, this REALLY hurts bad, and there’s nothing I can do about it, and it’s going to get worse . . . Yup, it just got worse.” And as you're thinking that, it's not an out of body experience by any means. It's a very IN body experience, and you're RIGHT THERE for the whole thing.
Unpleasant.
You could have avoided all that if you’d simply kiaied a split second sooner, and if you had KUNG FU ABS!
I’ve got ‘em. If you want ‘em just do what I tell you. As a matter of fact, just do what I tell you anyway and you’ll have them whether you want them or not.
First, a few pointers.
1) There is no such thing as the upper and lower ab muscles. The next time your workout buddy says he does such and such a certain way because it “isolates the upper abdominal muscles” laugh at him. It’s all one muscle. It’s called the rectus abdominis and it runs from your pelvic bone to your breast bone. When you contract it, you’re pulling your pelvis and rib cage together. Your back should be rounded. Don’t do crunches with a straight back – when you do that you’re transferring the load to the psoas major, which originates in the lower back. You’ll strain your back doing that.
2) Don’t recruit the hip flexors. This is another source of lower back strain. Since our hip flexors are generally stronger than our ab muscles, we rely on them by yanking ourselves up as our hip flexors tug on our spine.
Now then, if you want Kung Fu Abs, and are eager to isolate the rectus abdominis – and not engage the psoas major or the hip flexors, here’s what you do:
Either have a partner hold your calves near the Achilles Tendon pulling toward himself (horizontally away from your head), as you do rounded crunches, or hook your heels over something stationary so you’re pulling with your heels toward yourself (horizontally toward your head).
Either way, you engage the hip extensors. Since they’re antagonistic to the hip flexors, the hip flexors are necessarily relaxed. You remember the Law of Reciprocal Inhibition from that graduate Kinesiology course, right? Anyway, round the back to load the rectus abdominis instead of the psoas major and you avoid lower back stress.
Now give me 50! No, make that 3 sets of 50, 5 times a week. Keep it up and you'll get those Kung Fu Abs.
Take care, train like you mean it. I’m off to attend a Kettlebell workshop this weekend. I hope your weekend is just as fun and productive!
Rob LaPointe