Q: What's the best ab exercise?
A: Studies have shown that one exercise or another works certain abdominal muscles harder than other ab exercises do. But within each study you'll find lots of variation from one participant to the next - what works the upper abs hardest for one person in the study might work the lower abs hardest for another. The best exercise for you is probably the one that feels as if it's working your muscles the most while you're doing it.
Examples: A couple of years ago, I started doing stability exercises for the first time. The best-known of these is the plank, also called the bridge, also called that damned painful thing you do on your elbows and toes. You rest your weight on your forearms and toes, pull your abs in tight, and hold your body in a straight line from shoulders to heels. After a few weeks of doing this twice a week along with the similar side bridge, in which you rest your weight on one forearm and the outer edge of the same-side foot while holding your body straight as a pencil, I noticed muscles on the sides of my waist that I'd never seen before. I could feel those muscles working hard, and sure enough, those muscles grew.
Another time, mostly out of boredom, I decided to do sets of 100 crunches on a Swiss ball. My abs felt as if they'd been stoned (in the biblical sense), and within a couple of weeks, they looked distinctly more rocky.
Q: I've followed every bit of advice ever offered, and still have excess flesh right below my belly button. How do I get rid of it?
A: Allow us to quote a higher authority. "It's 100 percent diet, and it's the obvious stuff," says Jose Antonio, PhD, an adjunct professor of exercise science at Florida Atlantic University. "Eliminate processed carbohydrates. If it comes in a package, don't eat it."
If you've already tried eliminating junk carbs-fiberless cereals, sodas, "low-fat" baked goods-try something more advanced: Separate carbohydrates and fat, so you never eat both in the same meal. Ideally, you alternate between the nonfat and the noncarb meals throughout the day, with each meal containing some protein. This is a technique recommended by John Berardi, CSCS, a nutrition researcher at the University of Western Ontario in Canada who does individualized diet consultation at johnberardi.com.
It's easier to recommend than to implement. But I use it when I need to take off a pound or two of fat, and it works every time. A few examples of how to do it:
| |
No Fat |
No (Or Low) Carbs |
| Breakfast |
High-fiber cereal with blueberries and nonfat milk |
Eggs with low-fat meat |
| Lunch |
Sandwich made with turkey breast, whole-wheat bread, lettuce, tomatoes, and mustard |
Tuna salad with mayonnaise |
| Dinner |
Baked skinless chicken breast, sweet potato, and salad with nonfat dressing |
Sirloin steak and mixed- green salad (which has very few carbohydrates) with olive-oil-based dressing |
| Snack |
Nonfat yogurt, fruit |
Peanut butter |
» Fitness archive
Men's Health Philippines - June 2005 Issue
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We were doing hundreds of cute little crunches while he was doing dozens of nasty situps. Guess who had the abs?
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