Q: How much aerobic exercise should I do if I want my abs to show?
A: I can't think of a reason you have to do any. If you go on the theory that visible abs are a combination of (a) well-developed abdominal muscles and (b) very little body fat hiding them, then the two most important concerns for you should be...
1. exercise that builds visible muscle, and
2. a combination of diet and exercise that creates a calorie deficit, forcing your body to burn excess fat.
On point number one, endurance exercise is clearly pointless. No amount of jogging is going to help build your abdominal muscles. And on point two, you choose aerobic exercise only if you decide that you can't pos-sibly create that calorie deficit through strength training and a disciplined diet.
Some men are predisposed to be good at endurance exercise and not good at building muscle mass. These guys, if no one else, should find it easier to lose their excess belly fat through aerobics.
As for me, I've never been able to run farther than 5 miles at a time (and that was back when I was trying), so using endurance exercise for fat loss was never a very effective option.
A lot of guys try to do high volumes of both types of exercise, figuring that if you burn twice as many calories, you get your abs in half the time. I think this strategy is fine if you're 16 and your parents give you a nice allowance. But let's say you're an adult with a job and other sources of stress. ("Dad, why is Mommy crying so hard? It was just an old picture. I can draw sunflowers better than that guy!")
You have to figure out how much exercise you can recover from, not how much you can do. If your body can't recover from the extra exercise you do in the pool or on the road, it makes no sense to do it.
Q: I need a new ab exercise. Do you have any killers?
A: I think this one's called supine spinal flexion with inappropriately aggressive arm actions. I shorten that to "ass-kicker."
Lie on your back on the floor, knees bent and feet flat. Hold your fists up by your cheeks. Sit up, and, as you do, throw a punch or a combination of punches.
It's most intense when you stop short of a full situp position and throw the punches from there. You'll feel action from abdominal muscles you never knew you had.
You can make it more satisfyingly aggressive by having a training partner stand and hold a pillow or punching bag over your hips so you actually can hit something with your punches.
Q: What's best for abs-high reps, low reps, or something in between?
A: All of the above. High reps will challenge the smaller, more endurance-oriented muscle fibers. Low reps with heavy resistance will hit the fibers that produce strength and power. And at least a couple of times a week, do isometric holds of 30-60 seconds on the bridges and other injury-prevention exercises.
» Fitness archive
Men's Health Philippines - June 2005 Issue
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TEST YOUR AB-Q!
True or false: Crunches on a Swiss ball are better than crunches on the floor.
True. A 2000 study at the University of Waterloo in Ontario compared crunches on the floor with those on a ball and found that the rectus abdominis, the six-pack muscle, worked more than twice as hard on the ball. (The obliques worked four times harder.) The real discovery here is that the basic crunch is a pretty weak exercise, forcing the rectus abdominis to work at just 21 percent of its maximum effort.
True or false: It’s best to do ab exercises in the morning, when your body is fresh.
False. Your spinal disks fill with fluid overnight, which makes them much more prone to injury in the morning than later in the day, when they’ve had a chance to return to normal hydration levels. All ab exercises involve bending the spine, a movement that chal-lenges its disks even under the best conditions. Stick to sex in the morning, and work your abs some other time.
True or false: A situp with straight legs is more dangerous to your lower back than one with bent legs.
False. The straight-leg situp has long had a bad-back rep, based on the idea that it forces the hip-flexor muscles to contract so hard that they damage the soft tissues in your lower back. But a Swedish study published in 1997 found that the hip flexors work 111 percent harder during the bent-knee situp. Make no mistake: Straight is great.
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