Why You Should Never Avoid Obliques

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This program we've had for a long time Tons of people have followed it. lotots and lots of great reviews. It's fifty percent off. You can get the whole program for twenty eight dollars fifty cents. G to no Bs six pack d. com So that's no BS, number six pack . com use the code six packs. So that's the number six pack for the fifty percent off. Now this episode is brought to you by Super Patch. So this is a wearable neurotechnology company focused on helping people optimize how they feel and perform. So here's what's wild about this It's a drug free, non invasive patch that delivers targeted tactile stimulation through the skin to support things like sleep, focus, energy, mobility, recovery, stress management well beinging and more It sounds crazy, you guys. by years of research supported by more than a dozen peer reviewed studies And it's already being used by health practitioners, athletes and everyday consumers. I was super skeptical. I looked at the data. I look at the studies, you guys, the studies show that these things actually work and I now use them daily. basis. So you got to go check them out goo to their link Mindpump. superpatch. com That link will get you thirty dollars off. All right, real quick, if you love us like we love you, why not show up by rocking one of our shirts, hats, mugs, or training gear over at mypumppsstore dot com talking right now, hit pause, head on over to mypumpstore. com. That's it. enjoy the rest of the show. 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. messing it out.ot to. We're gonna 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, and then people wonder why they don't get great results when training the core. You have the best pulse on commercial gyms because you go to two of them. Yep pretty regularly Is this is this still Yep really rampant problem? This is still the way it is. 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 twenty years. People still haven't figured it out. And here's the good news, you guys. The good news is, if you train them the right way the results you get with your abs is phenomenal. And I mean exceptional. likeike thirty to sixty 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 U Show 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 And I think it may stem from the false idea that feeleeling the burn burns body fat, maybe from an area is where I'm guessing, you know, the whole idea of spot reduction. I feel like a lot of those like at home videos like the genene fondas and the jazzercise and a lot of the 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 know, you have to do at least one hundred, two hundred crunches. I wish I remember where I went wrong and where where 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 cabs were similar in that area and that they needed this higher amount of volume in order to get them to build and grow. so That's where it came least I wish I remember where I got that. Like do you remember? Reading that or hearing that? Yeah, like you hear like they recover faster than all the other muscles. I've heard that one. So slow twitch muscle fibers, this is a real gross oversimplification. It's more complex than this. Right, and it's individualized and they can change. Yeah faster It is very 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 hypertrophure growth. Fast switched 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. Yeah. This is what strength train an aerobic. Nobody built nice looking glutes doing one hundred and fifty reps People know this now by the way, because they used to train glutes this way as well. Now women figure this out. like I got to get really strong at squats and hip thrust 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 one hundred reps of all these different exercises, you know, we train in the lower rep ranges, right? fiveive reps up to maybe fifteen reps, maybe twenty reps at the top But you're training with resistance. and your're training heavy, 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 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. They become more visible at higher body fat percentages. This is like if you picture a guy let's say, sixteen percent body fat with little muscle on his arms versus a guy at sixteen percent body fat with a lot of muscle on his arms The lot of muscle guy, his arms look far more defined. Same body fat percentage, but you could see tricep and bicep. Why Because there's muscle underneath. Same thing for a woman, A woman at twenty seven percent body fat with no muscle. She looks flatty. twenty seven percent 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. you know, five reps up to maybe twenty at the most, not fifty, sixty hundred 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 apps to pop, you want to see them Train the lower rep ranges. You got to train them that way. I mean, I just 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 shhort pumping reps on the seated calf raises where you're rocking the thing up and down like fifteen twenty reps or you're super setting it like crazy. And that was the way I trained cs. 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 unlock. This This for me, this one thing for me made it so that, you know, I'd have to get down to like nine percent body fat to have likeike 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 they 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 sixty days. It was like within I had always trained my abs. I just trained them with a million reps When I went to resistance within sixty days, boom. Suddenly my abs became one of my best body parts because they built them. Yeah. So train them in the lower rep range like you would with other body. I wouldn I mean you maybe you could put a number on it or I'm sure this is a bit of an overgenalization, but I would say you can carry yourself at two to three percent higher body fat one hundred percent. So whate 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 three percent higher body fat. and you got abs and you have abs. Totally.. Next up, this is a big mistake in technique is that people When they see an exercise that's for abbs They think if the body's folding If the knees are coming up or the legs are coming up or the upper body iss coming up, you're working your abs.. That's true the abdominal muscles flex the lumbar spine. So if you look at a body Look at the rib cage. L at the bottom of the rib cage and the pelvis. This is where the abs attach. it's the bottom of the rib cage and the pelvis When the abs contract, they bring the ribcaage 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 my hips is what gets my abs 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 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. 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 thirty 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. Do guys remember the name of some good YouTube videos that we did on Mindpump 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, Hit Flex would de activator crunch. Is that one of the names? M Doug can look up. That's one video where I break it down. And the reason why I bring that up is because we can sit here and talk about on the podcast all day, but this is one of those things I'd have to get in with a client and like almost touch them and move them visual to go with. Yeah, because to the untrained eye, you see someone do knee ups or leg raises or any other crunch and it looks 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. 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 That's second one right therelex hit flexor deactivators Mind pump TV. Yeah. So go to that video and we queue it really well. That's right. So again, if' 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 a like you would see a waiter do with what's known as a waiter bll 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 some Way hard way different. 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. One thing about well, I 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 U and it literally deliberately would teach you that like how to reallyitally roll your hips up into position as opposed to you know, really like lifting your legs up and driving all that with your hip flexor. So you had to really stay tight and then push those hips and roll them into your body. 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 where they're holding on the bench and rolling their hips off the bench. It's your abs. No I think this is 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. They' a little more of an incline. And you just keep working the way until they 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. 'a going right to a Roman chair and then trying to cue somebody Oh forget How not to use their hip flexor or is this 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. I don't like leg raises. Legises are just unless you're a really advanced It's very get misused. Yeah. It's a long lever difficult exercisise. I just never I never trained my clients because there were so many other ab exercises that I wanted them to perfect before they got to that. It's like that's a really advanced movement. Especially when you see it's so popular. Remember there was a trend for a while there. It's not as popular know, but man everybody used to have their Oh Yeah the do the windsel wipers Yes and the straps, they would bring the straps to the gym their way up in the air and ye just like doing all this hip flexor stuff and it's just like, man, you just put that person that same person on just just an incline, which is easier and asked him to roll up ten times, perfect and you scorched her abbsolutely. So yeah. Next is is short range of motion. So when you're doing exercises on the floor And you lay all the way flat That's actually not a full range of motion for abs. A physio ball actually provides a full range of motion. because you have that forward crunch But then when you lay back and then you wrap your back around the ball, now you've got that arch in your back, you're stretching your abves. You're getting a very full range of motion. I'm going to say this right now If you do a proper setitu up on a physical ball, which nobody does. Nobody does this right. When I see people on a physiical ball and they throw reps around like crazy. If I used to do this in gyms when I would manage gyms, I'd come over. I'd help people and the same person who could do fifty reps on the physical ball could barely do three ro range of motion. Yeah. it's so different. You remember those infomercials with the bender ball? Yeah, It's so funny because I mean, they were what they're trying to highlight is like the real range of motion you could get into with that and they draw, you know that last bit that everybody was missing. Do we program any on the video ball where you put your feet up on the wall? No. we didn't do that? Oh, I love doing them more like that.. I love doing ' it's almost like your hip flexor deactivator where you elevate like that. And so what I would tell people to do is push their hips up You know, tellell them to p their hips up activate their glutes because that tend to deactivate the hip flexors. Yeah and then crush. In fact, I'm working with a buddy of mine now and I'm actually training somebody on a relatively regular basis. and we did some of these crunches on and he's like, Man, I do sit upps. He's like, I can't believe. these feel? Oh yeah. And it's really just because I'm taking them through that full range ofotion and And you're taking hip flex are completely out and And we're taking the hipx Because even people this this is also why this is a difficult to articulate on a podcast is because there's somebody listening right now who does ab exercise and goes, Ohh, I fill it in my abs. This isn't me. Yes And you are using some of your abs your abs are incorporated, they're stabilizing, they're in part of the range of motion there. So but you're also still using a lot of your hip flexors and completely taking the hip flexor out and isolating all the way down to the abs. Huge difference. No, when you're huge differe When you're flexing it's like the difference of taking somebody who is, you know, doing bicep curl straight versus swinging your arms in a bicep curl Yes, you know what I' saying?'s like, You're defitely some. I mean you rock your swing your arms and dumbbell curls. I mean I can do eighty pound dumbells. You know what I'm saying? But make me do that with strict form and fortyies become really heavy and difficult simimilar likeike Yeah, if you're if you're if you're flexing at the hip flexors, you're bringing your legs up, your abs have to stabilize. They do have to stabilize your lumbar spine in order to allow your hip flexors to do the work So you will feel fatigue and tired But you're essentially doing a long isometric. And if you want hypertrophy, I mean, everybody knows this, but and all the studies show this, and this is again, if you're listening to this, you know this How do you make a muscle build? You train it through a full range of motion. That's the best way to make it build partartial range of motion. They'll build less, no range of motion E extension. Builds even less. Full extension, full contraction. And so you want that full range of motion. And you'll see the results will explode if you've never done this before. Next up is they don't rest between sets Almost everybody does abs in a circuit. So it's like abs, obliques, state, you know Pank, back to, you know, back to this, back to that, back to bicycles becausecause they're looking for a lot of burn. I think a lot of our programming now that I think about it, a lot of our ab and core training programming came from group classes I think you mentioned it earlier the old workout videos. Yeah. Yeah, I honestly feel like that was the root of it all because Everybody in these classes would always just like, I mean, it was lots and reps Lots and lots of reps so the no structure could go around and try and queue them, but it was like, yeah, I think they just adopted it. Well, isn't that? I mean, one of the most famous at home videos is the six minute abs? Yeah that's what it's like literally just a six minute nonstop, you know, series of all kinds of ab exercises with no rests. fatigue is, you know, the biggest priority, right? withith a lot of those programming. So it's like too get the abs to feel like it's fatigue. It's like we got. And I think that was why that this got so popular is listen, if you've never traanged your abs before and all of a sudden you get you train six minutes straight of abs, like you're gonna You'll feel it. Yeah, you'll feel it, you'll see it, you'll be sore, you'll see some change. You know I'm say, you'll get some benefits from it But just like if you were to only do something like that with any other muscle, like you said, you would adapt get used to it. not see any more. Yeah, you don't build muscles. So what m strength training strength training. You know, you've got weights, you've got resistance, you've got reps, but it's the rest periods.. It's the rest periods that makeakes strength training, strength training. You have to rest in between sets because we're trying to use an energy system. that produces muscle growth or hypertrophy. We're trying to keep it anaerobic. If we go set to set to set to set, it becomes glycolytic,es is fine, It becomes aerobic, you get endurance. If that's what you want, that's great. But you're not going to build muscle. It's like long distance runners. The reason why long distance runners don't have muscular legs. They just don't, have skinny legs. Why? They've got lots of stamina. Big muscular legs do not produce lots of stamina. They prod require T much energy efficient. Too much energy. They're strong. they don't have tons of endurance. So if you want endurance, then go for it. But if you want abs and obliques and the core that can show then you want to rest in between sets and you want to train them like you do other body parts. And then finally, this one is really annoying to me is avoiding obliques Why? Because someoneking the waste. Someone said, I don't want to grow my wasate. I don't want to build the sides of my waist. I got to keep my wist. Well, this is stupid. This is really done. lookook. First of all, you're not gonna to add inches to your waist because you're building your obliques. But let me just tell you this, if you added a quarter inch to your waist of pure oblique muscle If I looked at you from the front and from the side, your waist is going to look amazing. It's going to look better. Yeah. It's going to look stronger. It's going to look tighter. It's going to look more defined. Not to mention the functionality Your obliques are so important. so protected Core stability to stabilize your lumbar spine, to produce movement, to produce locomotion, running, walking to keep you stable to make sure you don't hurt your back. like Avoiding ob bleak training is like you might as well be signing up for back injury. I definitely blame the men's physique and women's bikini for this one. Yeah. I think I mean, whether that was true before That category, those categories came out or not, they definitely made it worse. Like that that became a point that coaches would tell these clients is We want this tiny wasate. And so waste trainers became popular again and it became a thing not to train your obliques to eliminate exercises like deadlifts because they could build your oblique I mean, it became, that's how big it came. You started losing great movements and avoiding as well bring back a fainting couch while at it. Dude. Ter, it was such a terrible idea because to your point, even if it made your waist an inch wider, it made it look better. Yeah. Even on stage I always thought that was so interesting that it became this thing that it became popular even on for stage presence in athletics. It's like it looks better It doesn't look like you have you don't get like a boxy no shape to it. It's this complete shape that looks better. It's only to make your abs lines that are supposed to makes your ab more pronounced. It creates more that V below your abdominal. Its it's like why would obliques on a man and a woman look phenomenal. I you ask somebody from the opposite sex, like a woman with well develop mid section and obliques look incredible. And women would say You know what's funny about this If you look at ancient sculptures Greek and Roman sculptures of like Hercules, or they would, you know, depict maybe an athlete They were basing it off of what they saw on high performing athletes. And if you look at those sculptures the strongest. It's really interesting. They all have really muscular obliques.. If you look at a picture of a sculpture of Hercules One thing that stands out is these really strong looking obliques. Obliques give you power. It reminds me of when I used to get my female clients who didn't want to train legs because they didn't want, you know, bigger legs. bigger legsraz. And it's like more muscular legs, even if they're thicker inch wise and fill out your jeans more looks better. than just an inch smaller no muscle. It's like it looks way better to have that because it's defined. It looks sculpted, it looks shaped, it looks firmer. It's got better shape to it. It' like Yeah, that's right. But it's I think it's some of that. It's like, oh my waist is this big. L last thing I want to do is add another inch of it, but you don't muscle Yeah looks so much better. No go for it. Look, we have a program for training your core. It's only for abs and obliques And it's designed to build those muscles so they show So you can see them. It's a three month program. You will see more definition in your midsection. Your abs will be stronger than ever and so will your obliques And it's fifty percent off. You can actually get it for twenty eight dollars and fifty cents Go to noBS six pack d. com So that's no BS number six pack. com use the code six pack. So that's number six That'll give you fifty percent off. that makes it only twenty eight dollars