Six-pack abs: It's not just leanness, smartass

My readers are not idiots, so when I mentioned in my previous post  about how I wanted abs like a male gymnast you may have thought, Ah, but I am no fool. I know that spot reducing doesn’t work. You can’t do lots of crunches and just expect your stomach fat to disappear and abs to pop out. Having a visible 6-pack is just about leanness, or having so little fat that you can see the muscle tone underneath. Readers, I am so glad that you’re not idiots and that I don’t have to go over all of that stuff yet again, because frankly I’m tired of having that conversation. 

I’m talking about varsity-level training stuff here, though. Just like running a sub 15-minute 5K is a whole different animal than running your first 5K in under an hour, a lot of that kindergarten fitness knowledge gets flipped around when you look at more advanced stuff. Which is not to say that I’m the equivalent of a 15-minute 5K runner, oh god, I’m NOT saying that. I’m just saying that the rules change a bit when you move up from peewee to NCAA division one. 

Yes, having a six-pack depends on how much belly fat you have, but it can also depend on how big your muscles are. Picture the bird-boned elite marathon runner such as Paula Radcliffe (left). You can see her abs because she is so lean, but they don’t look like the rippling things that you could wash your shirt on. They look more like the deflated plasticized jerkey that you see at the Bodies exibit when all adipose tissue has been stripped away. Now picture a sprinter’s abs, Marion Jones, for example (okay, I'm showing that I haven't paid attention to track and field in over a decade, but see the picture below anyway). Jones is an especially good example, because the dude hormones that she was taking at her peak made her build more muscle mass, making those abs pop even more. At her peak form, Jones probably had around 16% body fat, and yet you could see all six lumps of her abdominals poking through because they were big. 

Think of it this way: take a pillow case and fold it up, then put it on your bed. Then take a pillow and put it on the bed. Then pull a big, fluffy comforter over both. Do you see the pillow case? How about the pillow? The larger your abdominal muscles are, the more you’ll be able to see them through your fluffly comforter of fat. I would rather build giant towering muscles than do what it takes to get rid of all the fat sitting on top of them. I just like cake too much. And while we're speaking of it, I will never have a waist because my obliques are too damned big. My challenge is staying lean enough that you can tell that my Ken doll muscle isn't all saddlebags. P!nk makes the Ken doll muscle sexy. I'm built more like a P!nk than a Heidi Klum. 

But how do you get strong abs? Crunches? Fuck crunches, they’re overrated. You don’t even get close to your full range of motion and you’re only lifting a tiny fraction of your body weight. Any exercise that you can do for more than about 15 reps or 30 seconds isn’t going to make great big abs that erupt from your belly. To build a rack of tall boys instead of nips, to get abs on top of your abs, you will need to get a little more advanced than anything that you can do while lying on the floor.

Here’s a quick kinesiology lesson: the abs bring your hips closer to your ribs and vice-versa. Gravity only goes in one direction. When you’re lying on the floor twitching like you’ve been tazed, you’re working at an angle to gravity, so not only are you only lifting a small fraction of your body weight (your head and shoulder with a crunch, your legs and hips with a reverse crunch), but that resistance actually becomes less depending on what angle you’re at. That’s why the bottom 1/3 of a sit-up is so much harder than the top, because that’s the only section where you’re actually pulling directly into gravity.  Mat work sucks for abs worthy of a men’s magazine. But we all knew from experience that that was true. 

If you really want to build a washboard stomach that looks like a chocolate bar, you’ve got to go for the advanced shit that pits you against gravity, or loads your abs up with lactic acid like a squat or a bench press does. I’m talking hanging leg raises (where you’re changing the tilt of your pelvis, not just lifting and dropping your legs) aka “knees to elbows,” GHD sit-ups, and other advanced moves that you won’t find in most ab classes. These are things that you need pretty gnarly core strength to even be able to do one of them properly. 

Now, before you think I’m an idiot again, I know that the abdominals’ (all of them: the rectus abs, transverse abs, and obliques inside and out) main function is to stabilize the body. Again, it depends what you are stabilizing against. If you put a relatively light load on your abs through activities such as running (Paula Radcliffe) or doing plank on a solid surface, your abs will quickly adjust to the load and won’t grow any further. Again, anything that you can do for more than about 30s isn’t going to put enough strain on your muscles to effect change. This is why you have to find ways to make your planks harder: do them with one arm and one leg, doing them on Bosus and with foam rollers under your elbows and toes, force yourself to hold the movement while your limbs are moving (i.e. spiderman plank or renegade rows), doing chest presses or playing catch with yourself while trying to stay horizontal on a decline ab bench, or put a freaking weight on your back. If you actually want to achieve anything with "ab" training, then it shouldn't be easy enough to be a cooldown. Otherwise you're doing about as much abdominal conditioning as a Zumba class, and having a lot less fun. 

Another thing about stabilizers is that they are usually small movements or isometric (without movement) contractions, and it’s the eccentric or “down” phase of a movement that causes the muscles to grow. If muscles don’t go back “down” against resistance, then they won’t grow. This is when your $10 ab roller, medicine ball catches, and holding a partner’s ankles while they throw your legs toward the ground come in. You've got to move muscles to make them bigger. Sure, 5 minutes of plank will make them more resistant to fatigue and will make you damned sore, but it won't actually give you a 6-pack. 

I've been at this core training thing for about 3 weeks. The first day I felt like the muscles weren't sore, but if you'd drawn a six-pack on me every line would have been sore through and through. Then again, I'd been down with strep the week before and was pretty damned weak. Since then, my core hasn't really been sore. What I can tell you is that whether it's the change in my training, because I've just been going through one of my phases where I'm eating better, or specifically because of the core work I've been doing, I saw my abs straining to poke through my fat on some kettlebell swings today. I'll keep you updated on their progress.