Weightlifting Belts | Weak Abs (UH-OH!!)

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What’s up, guys? Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX. com. It’s Washboard Wednesday and we’re talking weight belts. I’m talking about how this weight belt might be making your weight belt weaker.

You see, you actually have a weight belt that never cost you a penny, and you carry it around with you all the time. It’s your transverse abdominus. But by relying on this far too often you’re actually going to weaken that and have it cost you at the moment that it matters the most. On your big lifts. Let me reach for this one.

You see, the transverse abdominus is a muscle that lays right here under the rib cage and it wraps all the way around our body. Through the magic of the muscle marker we can actually see what it looks like. It actually comes right here, all the way around, and as you can see the orientation of the fibers is such that it lays just like a weight belt would. It actually functions the same way. It doesn’t move our body down this way.

What it does is, it actually takes our body and it cinches it in. so it does this. It does the same thing that a weight belt would do as you pull it tighter. It’s going to pulls ourselves and our abdomen in tighter, which will provide the circular stability of the spine and core. So if we’re going to train that muscle, you want to learn how to actually contract it so that it actually flattens the belly down.

Okay, so what it does is it takes this belly down from being out here and it learns to flatten it down, provide stability then, again, it wraps all the way around. I teach you how to do this through a lot of our lower ab exercises. As a matter of fact, most of our ab exercises in this video that I cover over here – you’re going to want to watch that and see how we do that specifically. But the importance of this video is to get you understanding the fact that the more of this that you use, the more you’re actually going to be completely counteracting what you’re trying to accomplish in the first place. That is stability.

If you wear a weight belt, the first thing that happens is – if you wear it appropriately you’re actually going to have a little bit of extra room in here. You never want to pull it all the way tighten like this because you actually don’t give yourself any room to push out against with this intra-abdominal pressure. So you have it a little bit loose so you can now push into it and then have that pressure against the pad, which is pushing back in the opposite direction. Just giving you that extra torque in spinal stability. If you do that, think about what you’re actually doing.

You’re actually training yourself with a distended belly. You’re training yourself this way. You push out as you stabilize. When, in actuality, the healthier, more protected spine has the ability to bear down and still have that intra-abdominal pressure, but with a flatter belly because you have the contractions of the transverse abdominus. So that’s one reason why you wouldn’t want to rely on the weight belt.

The second one is, over use of this is just going to make inactivity of the transverse abdominus result in a weaker transverse abdominus so you can’t rely on it when you really need it. So I’m advising you to ditch the weight belt. Here’s the instances where I would say it’s okay. If you are somebody with a history of back pain, whether you had surgeries, lumbar fusion, discectomy, significant back injuries that have laid you up for a significant period of time; then I would say it’s okay to use this as you get yourself back into training from that injury, but only if you agree that you’re going to train your core directly and increase the strength of your transverse abdominus like I showed you in that video that I linked over there, with the focus of building that up over time. So you can wean yourself off of this.

Use this as a crutch to get you back in the game again. On the other end of the spectrum, if you’re a competitive power lifter there’s a power lifting belt that we, again, covered on the Instagram profile that will allows you to generate even just a little bit more force in your lift, that will increase your lift total by even a small amount. That could mean the difference between first place and third place, or setting a new PR. In those cases you can train there, but not a lot of the guys that are watching this channel are competitively power lifting at that degree. A lot of them are watching to either get bigger, stronger, faster, and more athletic.

And again, athletic, you’re not allowed to take these out with you on the playing field, or at least not comfortably. So we don’t want to train you to become reliant on this. I want to train you like an athlete to rely on the one that you have with you all the time. So guys, I hope you’ve found this video helpful. Hopefully for those that are over reliant on their weight belts it will be a wakeup call.

In the meantime, if you’re looking for a program that will train you like an athlete and make you rely on the muscles that you have so that you become more functionally strong and capable of performing at a moment’s notice because you have everything that you have with you all the time and you’re prepared to use it; that’s over at ATHLEANX. com with our ATHLEANX training system. If you want to see anything else covered here in a washboard Wednesday video make sure you leave it in the comments below and I’ll do my best to bring those to you in the weeks ahead. All right, guys. I’ll see you again real soon.