ABS 101 - Step by Step Six Pack Plan! (TARGET EVERY AREA)

If you want to get abs then this is the video you need to watch. Here I will break down for you everything you need to know about getting a six pack fast and how to construct your ab workouts in order to waste no time in doing so. It starts with the anatomy of the abdominal muscles and realizing t

What’s up, guys? Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX. com. Today we’re talking all about the abs, and I’m going to show you – in what I think is the most definitive video – how you’re going to get yours to pop, and the best tips that you can apply to your ab training to make sure you’re getting them to show. Now, let me start off with a couple of things.

When we talk about abs we’re not just talking about the abs alone. I think you’re probably meaning everything in this region here, and that’s a whole hell of a lot more muscles than just the abdominals. I want to show you how to hit all of these things, and of course, we’re breaking out the muscle markers to help us do that. One up front caveat that I know we need to talk about because some people always come around these videos looking for that shortcut. I’m going to tell you right here, to your face; there is no shortcut when it comes to having your abs show if you refuse to watch what you’re putting into your mouth.

Your diet is going to dictate how well your abs show every, single time. No matter how much cardio you do you’re never going to outrun a bad diet. So, if your diet is in check, then you can start to see all the rewards of watching all these muscles come into play, and into focus as you start to work them the way I’m going to show you, okay? I want to make sure I cover that. Now, let’s take a look at the anatomy, since we’ve started talking about it.

When we look at the core we have the rectus abdominus here, which is broken up into however many packs. That damn Jesse has an 8. I seem to have 6. One, two, three, four, five six. Now, the linea alba is the line that runs right down the middle and sutures across here, which is going to compartmentalize the abs into those regions.

I’m going to show you how you can actually use that to your advantage in the future to get these abs to pop a little more. We’re going to cover that in a little bit. But besides the rectus abdominus, this muscle runs this way. The fibers of this muscle run up and down. That means through flexion and extension – keep in mind ‘extension’, because we’re going to hit that, too – through flexion and extension, we contract that muscle.

But because we can actually flex the pelvis from the bottom up we know we can hit the lower abs because the fibers are preferentially hit differently by having the lower portion of the pelvis move from on the top. Versus the top moving down on the bottom. We can preferentially hit these two areas slightly differently, depending upon the exercises we choose. We have the upper region and the lower. From the side here, we have the obliques – as I contract – that run all the way down here at this oblique angle.

They feed all the way down, and in. We don’t just have the visible external obliques here, but we also have the internal obliques that run up at this opposite angle. So, they run this way, and the external obliques run at this angle. Now, you don’t want to forget the all-important serratus, which is the muscle that runs up through here. They help us push our arm away from our body.

But – here’s a bit word for you, guys – they interdigitate. Meaning, they intertwine here with the external obliques to complete that look. So, when they’re both working together, as you can see here, they’re going to help to carve out that mid-section completely. So, you don’t want to ignore those. Of course, we finally have the transverse abdominus, which runs across this way.

Basically, like your own inner weight belt. When it closes down, and cinches down, and contracts it provides support all the way around the midsection, all the way through to the back of the spine. So how are we going to hit these areas now, but make sure we’re covering all the anatomy, but getting them each with an exercise that’s going to do the best job? Well, it takes breaking them down one by one. If we look at the first region here, the lower ab region, we’re going to look for exercises like this that initiate the movement with the bottom moving on a fixed top.

Basically, curling the pelvis up, toward you. That can happen in any of the floor exercises, in the hanging ab exercises that you’re seeing here. The fact is, the pelvis is coming up toward the top, initiating the contraction from the bottom up, and therefore, slightly favoring those lower ab fibers. Now, we can take that from there and apply the same concept to hitting the upper abs. That means we want to take any exercise that allows us to initiate the movement from the top down.

Maybe the legs stay stationary, but the top, and our shoulders are coming off the floor, creating that spinal flexion down toward the pelvis. The next thing we want to do is, if we’re going to hit the obliques – again, guys, I always talk about following the fibers. We know that obliques run at these acute, diagonal angles here. If we realize that, we need to know that rotation is going to help us accomplish that. It doesn’t just have to be rotation this way.

I could stay fixed here and rotate from the bottom. Therefore, we have top down rotation, which is rotating on a fixed lower half, or I have bottom-up rotation, which is rotating on a fixed upper half. There are a lot of different ab exercises that allow us to do this. The key is, you want to make sure you’re using these exercises to effectively target the obliques specifically. Now, know again – as I mentioned in the beginning – the serratus is a muscle that doesn’t seem to get that much love.

Exercises like this one here in particular are perfect at it. This is done on a physio ball for a little extra stability challenge. We’re just going to have our arms on the ball, and once we get in that stable plank we try to push our arms straight through the ball, allowing our back to rise up toward the ceiling even more. Again, it doesn’t just have to end there. Maybe you don’t have a physio ball.

We’ve talked about doing it on a captain’s chair, which could easily be the corner of a kitchen countertop. You just get your body in there and push your body away, and lift away, so the serratus is actually doing its job. Another option for you here. Finally, the transverse abdominus tends to have its own set of exercises, or at least technique, that allows us to hit that area because you have to be really conscious of keeping your belly pulled in and flattened. I’ll get to this in a second with some exercises because we specifically talk about the breathing being one of the main factors for controlling how well you’re able to perform this.

As far as a sequence here, an overall ‘how would you stack these exercises together? ’, here’s a general rule of thumb. Because we’re moving the legs in all those lower, bottom-up movements we realize that they become pretty damn hard because of the weight of the legs that we have to move. That instantly makes them the most difficult choices in all our ab training arsenal. We want to make sure we’re doing those bottom-up and bottom-up rotation exercises early on in whatever ab workout you’re doing, when you have the most strength.

It continues to move up realizing that the rotational movements of just the obliques are going to become a little more challenging because rotation is something a lot of don’t train often enough. And those tend to be a little bit weaker. Again, we tend to do this in combination with some spinal flexion, so it makes it a little more difficult than the same, straight, top-down movements, which usually come later. The mid-range and the top-down movements with our lower body fixed, moving like a classic crunch would actually be a