Contour Enthusiasts Group Archives Forums General Common Interests best ab workout/routines

ive been working on my stomach now for about a year now...but i need to change up my routine.
it consisted of:
50 regular
80 straight leg
100 bicycle
40 side (each side)
(adding more reps if i felt like it)

does anybody have a really good specific crunch or even a routine that i could use. mainly worried about the lower.


and by the way...my routine that im changing...very very good and effective

this is not my routine but that of a martial arts world camp i used to know. daily he would do:
-500-1000 reps of sit ups or crunches depending on how he felt that day.
-run five miles
-500-1000 push ups
-streching

the man had a stomach like a rock.

Honestly, spend the $100-$200, go to a sports medicine place and have your VO2 max tested. They will tell you all of your zones and which ones to do on which days. Zones are just target heart rates in relation to your max heart rate before you go into complete lactic acid threshold. Your body reaches a point when your lungs can no longer metabolize the oxygen in your lungs, and your body produces too much lactic acid for the oxygenj to process. There are several zones you should work out in. The sports medicine place will tell you exactly what heart rate in relationship to your max heart rate will burn the most fat. And since most people store the most fat on their stomachs, your stomach will go down like crazy. Doing sit ups will not get rid of the fat and it can actually make you look fqatter. Reason is by doing a bunch of sit ups, you are actually building the muscles under your layer of fat. the bigger muscles will make you appear to be fatter than you really are. You really can not get into the right zone by doing sit ups because you will hit your anabolic threshhold before you get into the fat burning zone. Anabolic threshold is basically when your body starts to flood the muscles with lactic acid. once this happens, you can not exercise that muscle any longer efficiently. anyways, sorry for the long post and good luck.

Step one is to ignore everything Bike2112 said, except the vague reference to sit-ups not being the only way to get rid of your gut. Maybe you know and do this, but you need to incorporate intense aerobic exercise into your routine of abdominal workouts. Not doing so will build muscle under your layers of fat and you will never see results. But, contrary to the Circus Science that Bike2112 presented to us, you need sit-ups (or other abdominal exercise) in order to get definition there.

My advice depends on what type of equipment you have access to. If your gym has an ab board, use that for your crunches. Do 50-80 or so traditional crunches. Rest for a minute and then do outer-elbow-to-knee crunches to work the obliques. Equipment like the piece pictured below should have a handle on it so that you can spin around and do leg-ups, which reverse the crunch motion. You can also vary the motion of the leg-ups to work larger muscle areas. That has been my routine, and it works well. The leg-ups work your lower abs. You'll find that out the first time you do them.

I'm surprised that you saw results using the routine you used. I used to do sit-ups like those, and they never gave me a broad enough range of motion to be very effective.

thanks alot guys for your input, im gonna try them for about a week and see how it works.

i think one of the reasons that my old routine was effective and i saw results was because i was swimming, on average, 2500 yards a day, varying my strokes

but again, thanks

You need to change your routine around often, as muscle adjusts to any constantly repetitive motion and your gains will slow and plateau in time. My experience is that stomach muscles do this less so than other muscle areas, but you will hit a wall sooner or later...

I usually do a variation of 8-10 different excercises on my stomach every other day, which lasts about 10 minutes. High reps are a waste in my opinion; the various crunch routines I do only see up to 30-40 reps with everything else seeing 15-20. The key is variety; you want to shock your muscles.

High reps will get you there, but I get MUCH better definition out of juggling a large variety of excercises with a low to medium number of reps than plugging away at 3-4 excercises and a ton of reps. Even shuffle the areas you start on first (lower, mid, upper, side). I've been told to start with lower abs and work my way up, but I meander all over the place...

Get a book on ab excercises and play around with them. It will take a while, but you'll find a good mix of excercises that will give you a hell of a "burn" and work best with your body. You can go broke buying ab isolation equipment; a bench, a gym mat and few medicine balls are all you will ever need if you adjust your routine around.

Finally, fat is burned off in layers on your body. Anybody telling you that they can target fat burn is selling something or they don't know what they are talking about.

By the way, I'm 30 with a 32 inch waist at 165 lbs. and I've carried an 8-pack since I was in high-school, so I'm obviously doing something right. A lot of it is the type of diet I keep and my genetics, but I won't totally dismiss my routines, either.

running is quite possibly one of the bets workouts you can do for abs. long distance running is harsh on your abs (and a lot of other parts of your body besides your legs, actually). not only is it one of the best methods to burn off fat, but it'll tone your midsection down rather quickly. standing erect and moving your upper body they way you do when you run (did I make any sense right there?) for 45 minutes a day will have you droppin pounds and inches, toning your entire body in no time. this is not, however, a good think to do if you want to bulk up. ever wonder why you never see bulky, muscular long distance runners?

"Circus Science" LOL! That hit the nail on the head.

Wasting money getting imaginary sh!t measured is just that, a waste of money. How is the workout you end up doing going to be any different? You work out till it hurts - that's my motto!

Do the ab excercises Davo described and you'll build ab muscles well, but not doing aerobic activity will never allow you to see them. I play indoor soccer for my aerobic activity. My g/f is a Marathon runner and she has an awesomely flat stomach (and body ). I on the other hand lift a lot of weight so I can't have the lean look as well as the bulk. Not at this point in the game, anyway.

I do the ab roller 4 sets to failure
then I do a hanging leg raise 4 sets of 20 (grasping the bar as if u were doing a wide pullup)
thirdly i move on to a cable crunch 4 sets of 20 (medium heavy weight)
and lastly i do leg lifts with 15-20lb weight slowly