2887: Why Nobody Has the Abs They Want (And It's Not Body Fat)

0:00Justin Andrews:If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. Mind Pump. Mind Pump. With your hosts, Sal Di Stefano, Adam Schafer, and Justin Andrews.

0:13Adam Schafer:You just found the most downloaded fitness, health, and entertainment podcast. This is Mind Pump. Today, we're going to talk about how not to train your abs. Everybody wants a nice midsection. They want a six-pack, and almost everybody trains it wrong. We break it down and tell you how to do it the right way. By the way, we have a program that's designed to help you develop a six-pack to give you an incredible midsection. It's the most effective midsection training program around. It's the most effective program to get a six-pack. It's a relaunch. It's been revamped. This program we've had for a long time.

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2:13Adam Schafer:All right, look. You want a nice looking midsection. You want a six pack. You want to look trim. You're doing it all wrong. We're talking about how not to train your abs. These are mistakes everybody makes. This is why nobody has nice looking abs. Let's get to it. Stop messing it up. Not to. We're going to talk about the big mistakes that everybody makes when training their abs. And for some reason, we view the abs or the core as if it's some different kind of muscle that responds differently to exercise. And we got to train it in a particular way. We don't really apply this to any other body parts.

2:46Adam Schafer:And then people wonder why they don't get great results when training the core.

2:50Sal Di Stefano:You have the best pulse on commercial gyms because you go to two of them pretty regularly. Is this still a really common problem? It's just still the way it is.

3:02Adam Schafer:It has not changed. When I see people training their abs or their core in commercial gyms, it looks like what we're about to talk about. It has not changed in 20 years. People still haven't figured it out. Here's the good news, you guys. the good news is if you train them the right way, uh, the results you get with your, your abs is phenomenal. And I mean, exceptional, like 30 to 60 days, you see massive changes in how your abs look if you just train them the right way. So I'll start with the first thing. Uh, somehow a long time ago, the idea was put into our minds that you need to train your abs with really, really high reps yeah like lots and lots and lots of reps um and i think it may stem from the false idea that feeling the burn burns body fat maybe from an area is where i'm guessing you know the whole

3:56Justin Andrews:idea of spot reduction i feel like a lot of those like at home videos like the jane fonda's and the jazzercise and a lot of the uh prescription there was always just like so many reps and it was like That was sort of what you'd see in the gyms. It just kind of trickled in the gyms. And everybody thought that you have to do at least 100, 200 crunches.

4:17Sal Di Stefano:I wish I remember where I went wrong and whether it was a magazine or where I read it. But I remember reading something on the difference between fast twitch and slow twitch fibers and how you train them. That's what I remember. and the abs and the calves were similar in that area and that they needed this higher amount of volume in order to get them to build and grow. And so that's where it came. And I wish I remember where I got that. Do you remember reading that or hearing that?

4:49Justin Andrews:Yeah, like you hear like they recovered faster than all the other muscles. I've heard that one too.

4:53Adam Schafer:So slow twitch muscle fiber, this is a real gross oversimplification. It's more complex than this.

5:00Sal Di Stefano:Right, and it's individualized and they can change. Yeah, like fast twitch can start to act like slow twitch.

5:05Adam Schafer:But generally speaking. Generally speaking, slow twitch muscle fibers are the muscle fibers that produce endurance. They have lots of endurance. They don't have a lot of capacity for hypertrophy or growth. Fast twitch muscle fibers generate lots of power and strength, and these are the ones that grow. This is why if you want to build your glutes or you want to build your arms or your chest or your back, you train heavy.

5:29Justin Andrews:Yeah.

5:29Adam Schafer:This is what strength training is. Pure anaerobic. Nobody built nice-looking glutes doing 150 reps. People know this now, by the way, because they used to train glutes this way as well. Now, women figure this out. I got to get really strong at squats and hip thrusts. That'll make my glutes grow. We've known this for other body parts. Nobody sits in the gym who wants to develop a physique and does 100 reps of all these different exercises. We train in the lower rep ranges, right? five reps up to maybe 15 reps, maybe 20 reps at the top, but you're training with resistance and you're training heavy.

6:05Adam Schafer:This is what causes muscle fibers to grow. Do you want your ab muscle fibers to grow or hypertrophy? Yes. This is what makes them stick out. This is what gives you abs. Now you, if you, you can definitely get lean enough, ultra lean to where you see them because there's no body fat on them, but here's the beauty of building your abs. Uh, they become more visible at higher body fat percentages. This is like, if you picture a guy at, let's say, 16 % body fat with little muscle on his arms versus a guy at 16 % body fat with a lot of muscle on his arms, the lot of muscle guy, his arms look far more defined.

6:43Adam Schafer:Same body fat percentage, but you could see tricep and bicep. Why? Because there's muscle underneath. Same thing for a woman. A woman 27 % body fat with no muscle, she looks flabby. 27 % with muscle, curve, and shape. It's the muscle that accomplishes that look. And the way you do that is with reps that you would train other body parts with. Five reps up to maybe 20 at the most, not 50, 60, 100 reps. That's going to give you stamina and endurance. There's nothing wrong with that if that's what you want. But if you want your abs to pop, you want to see them, train the low rep ranges. You got to train them that way.

7:20Sal Di Stefano:I mean, I brought that up because I made this similar. And I know this is about abs, but I find that this is super common with calves too. And I made that same mistake. Like I did these short pumping reps on the seated calf raises where you're rocking the thing up and down like 15, 20 reps or you're super setting it like crazy. And that was the way I trained calves. And the same goes for how I trained abs. It was like this bicycle abs into full levers. into like you're just doing tons of stuff for it and they're burning and they're getting pumped and you're like oh this this is the way to train them never once did i think to do slow controlled full range of calf raises or slow weight yeah with heavy weight um and it wasn't until i did that with my calves did the light bulb go off for my abs and i went oh my god like this was a huge

8:12Adam Schafer:This for me, this one thing for me made it so that, you know, I'd have to get down to like 9 % body fat to have like a six pack. But even then I'd have to flex to kind of see it. And I was always envious of the, I'd see guys who could just walk on relaxed with six pack abs. And I was leaner than they would, than they were. It wasn't until I started to train them for strength. And I'm not exaggerating everybody. I want people to know this. It took me 60 days. It was like within, now I'd always train my abs. I just trained them with a million reps. when I went to resistance within 60 days, boom, suddenly my abs became one of my best body parts because they built them.

8:48Adam Schafer:So train them in the lower up range like you would with other body parts.

8:50Sal Di Stefano:And I would, I mean, you could, maybe you could put a number on it, or I'm sure this is a bit of an overgeneralization, but I would say you can carry yourself at two to 3 % higher body fat. 100%. So whatever you, whatever it takes you to get down to, to see your abs now, if you've never trained them like this before, you now can carry yourself at two to 3 % higher body fat. And you've got abs. And you have abs. Totally.

9:13Adam Schafer:Next up, this is a big mistake in technique, is that people, when they see an exercise, that's for abs, they think if the body's folding, if the knees are coming up or the legs are coming up or the upper body's coming up, you're working your abs.

9:28Justin Andrews:Yeah.

9:29Adam Schafer:That's not true. The abdominal muscles flex the lumbar spine. So if you look at a body, look at the rib cage, look at the bottom of the rib cage and the pelvis. This is where the abs attach. It's the bottom of the ribcage and the pelvis. When the abs contract, they bring the ribcage closer to the pelvis. What they don't do is flex the hips. So me bringing my leg up without rotating my hips, because the rotating of my hips is what gets my abs to contract. If I just bring my legs up, it's hip flexors. You see this most commonly in leg raises. I see people like this all the time in the gym. When they're doing leg raises and they've got their arms on the brace and they're lifting their legs back and forth and there's no ab contraction.

10:12Adam Schafer:There's ab stabilization. Your abs are stabilizing your spine, but it's all hip flexors. And this is why I see middle-aged people being able to do 30 reps of leg raises. If I go over there and correct their form, they'll be able to do maybe four proper reps because they're actually rolling and flexing at the lumbar and getting a full range of motion of the abs or working the abs the way they're supposed to work.

10:34Sal Di Stefano:Do you guys remember the name of some good YouTube videos that we did on Mind Pump TV related to this because this one's really hard to articulate on a podcast to get someone to understand. Because to the untrained eye... Hip flexor deactivator crunch. Is that one with the names? Maybe Doug can look up some of those.

10:51Adam Schafer:That's the one video where I break it down.

10:53Sal Di Stefano:And the reason why I bring that up is because we can sit here and talk about it on the podcast all day. But this is one of those things I'd have to get in with a client and almost touch them and move them. They need a visual to go with it. Yeah, because to the untrained eye, You see someone do knee ups or leg raises or any other crunch, and it looks the same. They might look at it and go, now, obviously, to your eye, anybody, trained eye, we can see it, right? You can see the way they're moving. But the average person, the movement looks the same.

11:21Adam Schafer:What it looks like is if you're, imagine somebody standing straight up and then doing a waiter's bow with real tall posture versus somebody who's hunching down and rolling down. There it is right there. That's the second one right there. Yeah.

11:33Sal Di Stefano:Hip flexor deactivators, mind pump TV. So go to that video and we cue it really well.

11:40Adam Schafer:That's right. So again, if I'm bending over, but I'm rolling, I'm rounding my low back, that would be my abs versus bending over at the hips like you would see a waiter do with what's known as a waiter bow. So the abs do not flex your body at the hips. They flex the lumbar spine, which is above the hips. So if you did a leg raise and you were trying to work your abs, the way you would lift your legs up would be through tilting the pelvis up. It would not be through flexing the hips. And let me tell you something.

12:11Justin Andrews:Way harder. Way different.

12:12Adam Schafer:Way. Way harder. Way different. Most people can bring their knees up with their hip flexors. Most people cannot roll their hips off the back of the bench.

12:19Justin Andrews:One thing about, well, I went through like a brief, you know, period where I was trying to learn a lot of gymnastic moves. And they had this one move and it was called the ball up. And it literally deliberately would teach you that, like how to really roll your hips up into position as opposed to, you know, really like lifting your legs up and driving all that with your hip flexors. So you had to really stay tight and then push those hips and roll them into your body.

12:45Adam Schafer:You know what I used to do with my clients as one of our first, one of the first exercises to teach them how to do this was a reverse crunch. A reverse crunch, you know, where they're holding on the bench and rolling their hips off the bench. It's your abs.

12:57Sal Di Stefano:No, I think the best regression to this is laying flat on the floor first and teaching them how to roll up like Justin's describing and then giving them a little bit of an incline, a little more of an incline, and you just keep working away until they can really figure out how to articulate the spine like that and roll it up. And then you get – now that light bulb kind of goes off for them, and then now you can put them in like a Roman chair or something like that. Totally. Because going right to a Roman chair and then trying to cue somebody how not to use their hip flexors. It's just like, which is why I think we've talked about this a long time ago, but how much we, I don't like that exercise.

13:32Sal Di Stefano:I don't like leg raises. Leg raises are, unless you're a really advanced person, you just know it's going to get misused.

13:38Adam Schafer:Yeah. It's a long lever, difficult exercise. I just never,