Core Training For A Six Pack

A few facts about getting a six pack.

You hear a lot about core training these days. There is alot of truth to what you are seeing however as per most things in the media, its getting a little far out. Almost daily in the gym I see trainers getting people onto swiss balls, standing on one foot, rubbing their tummy with onehand and patting their heads with the other. Well notreally but you get the point.

The fact of the matter is that without a strong core, you have to power and are susceptible to injuries. The methods to getting a strong core however are a lot less complex then some people are making it.

Core training in of itself is a simple concept. You are working the diaphram, multifidus transverse abdominis, and pelvic floor deep inside. On the exterior you have the prime movers. These are the more visible ones that everyone wants to see.

If you work movements such as the overhead lifts that directly involve the spine you are on the fast track to productive core training. Yes, the stability ball has its uses but there are limits and when the complexity of the movement exceeds the effective results you can stimulate with it you are heading down the "fad/gimmick route".

Looking out at the gym floor and watching the infomercials you can see that it's getting crazy. Granted, most of the movements are a hoot to try and fun to play with on an off day, but that in itself does not make them the most effective methods. It makes them fun to do with a beneficial side effect.

Is training your core the fastest way to getting a six pack of attention grabbing rippling abs? Absolutely not. Core training makes your core stronger, more conditioned and more muscular. This is a great thing and everyone that wants pain free optimum performance needs a strong core. However, getting your abs to show in the mirror is a result of getting the fat off them. Take off the fat blanket and voila, there are your abs.

Do you think a 359 pound Olympic lifter that can pull 551pounds from the floor and then stand up with it overhead has a strong core? The answer is yes without a single doubt. Does that lifter have a set of strong and well developed abs? Again the answer is yes. Now for the kicker.Can you see them? Nope. Not even a hit of a six-pack to beseen anywhere.

His abdominals are covered by a layer of fat.

So then if fastest way to getting a visible, beach ready six pack is through fat loss, then how do we do that?

You burn off fat by creating a small calorie deficit through several factors including a proper eating plan,exercising your WHOLE body with multi joint, mutidimensional movements like the clean and press or overhead squat and including some high intensity cardio.

If this is really the case, then why is everyone and their dog selling core training?

Answer: Because everyone and their dog is willing to buy a promised shortcut to the land of easy six packs.

Really effective training is simple, but simple doesn’t mean easy.

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Training With Muscle Soreness - Should You Do It? And Can It Actually Help You Get BETTER Results?

By Nick Nilsson

Muscle soreness is something that every trainer has experienced. The typical advice is to wait until you're notsore to train that muscle again. But what if you can actually get BETTER results by training when sore!

It's safe to say that muscle soreness is something EVERY trainer has experienced at some point in their career. Severity of muscle soreness (known as Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness or DOMS for short) can range from mild discomfort when you move to the point of being almost crippling.
One of the most frequent questions I am asked is "should you train when your muscles are still sore?" The answer is not quite as simple as some people make it out to be, though. Many trainers will tell you "if the muscle is still sore, don't train it." And, in truth, for many people that's the safest answer.
But, in fact, by NOT training when you're sore, you could actually be missing out on results AND slowing down your recovery!
So what is muscle soreness? Muscle soreness is basically damage to the muscle fibers as a result of training. Without going into great detail on how it happens and how the recovery process occurs (which is beyond the scope of this article), muscle soreness is your body telling you that it's in need of repair.
Now how can it possibly be GOOD for you to train a muscle again while it's still sore? Here's where we get into a contentious area. After reading this, you may choose to agree with me or disagree with me (if you've read my articles before, you know I'm anything BUT conventional) but all I ask is that you consider my arguments...
Now, if you've never trained a muscle hard two days in a row or trained it while it was still quite sore, you're going to be in for a shock at how unique a stimulus it can actually be. Sure there are arguments against doing that, e.g. the muscle hasn't fully recovered and you'll be tearing it down even more.
But consider this...from an adapatation standpoint, of the following two scenarios, what would give your body the greater stimulus for growth?
If you train the muscle hard once, you'll get a good growth stimulus. Your body immediately starts sending nutrients to the damaged area and starts rebuilding. When the muscle is fully recovered and is no longer sore, you train the muscle again and restart the process. This is the standard way of training and it usually means directly training a muscle twice a week with at least 2 or 3 days in between sessions for that specific muscle.
In the next scenario, you train the muscle hard then the next day, train it hard again. Recovery is nowhere near complete and the muscle is sore when you train it on the second day.
Here's the key...if you think about it, would the body see this second scenario as a greater threat to its survival? Would the body then ramp up its recovery processes to try and prepare for the next challenge, which it (from its recent experience of being hit with the same hard stimulus two days in a row) thinks is coming again very soon?
In my experience, this absolutely happens. The body's response to training is a very simple "stimulus-response" system, but your body is also fully capable of sending more resources where more resources are perceived as being needed.
When you eat, your body sends more blood to the digestive system. Your brain doesn't tell it to do that, it just happens. When you get hot, your body produces perspiration. The same thing happens with training. For example, when you train your biceps, your body sends blood and nutrients to the biceps for recovery. It doesn't send it to the calves if the calves haven't been worked.
If you train your biceps hard two days in a row, your body sees this as a big threat to the biceps and will ramp up recovery processes to specifically protect the biceps. If the biceps are still sore... VERY big threat! THEN you allow the biceps to recover. The two days of training has built much greater recovery momentum, getting more results out of your training.
Here's yet another advantage to training a muscle when it's still sore...even if you don't train it hard, you will still be sending blood (and therefore nutrients) to that muscle, helping it to recover faster than if you didn't train it at all. So even if you're not up for a hard workout for a sore muscle, even giving it some light to moderate work will still help with recovery.
So I've talked about training a muscle two days in a row...what about when you're scheduled to train it a couple of days later and it's still sore at that point? The same concepts apply - your body will STILL perceive that as a greater threat and increase recovery.
The only times I would NOT recommend training when sore is if the soreness causes you to use poor form in your exercises or if the soreness is so bad that it makes the exercises too painful to do.
For instance, if you just did deadlifts for the first time in your life and the next day, you have a VERY hard time sitting down without falling down into the seat, you may want to wait a bit before doing deadlifts again. Your form will change because of the pain and it could lead to injury.
But if your muscles are a bit stiff or sore, go ahead and train them. Your body will ramp up your recovery processes in response.
How do I know training the body with this frequency can be effective? I'll give the best example I know (WARNING - if you're a proponent of high-intensity, very infrequent training, this will make you shiver in your boots!). This is NOT a program I would recommend lightly to anyone because at this time, being on vacation from work, I was basically only eating, sleeping and training...no stress, no extraneous activity.
This was one of the most extraordinary programs I ever put myself on, not only in terms of workload but results as well. It involved doing total body workouts twice a day, six days a week. This meant 12 total-body workouts per week, increasing the workload every week.
I used partial training, negative training, low reps and high reps. For the entire first week, I was EXTREMELY sore but I stuck with it and trained everything twice a day, no matter how sore I was.
After 3 weeks of this training, I backed off, still doing 12 training sessions per week but splitting the body in half - I was still working my whole body every single day and doing partials and negatives.
During the back-off phase, my recovery processes were practically unstoppable! NOTHING I did could make me sore (and believe me, I tried!) and my strength and muscle mass shot way up.
Conventional wisdom would believe I would be completely totaled at the end of a program like this, overtrained, small and weak. My results? In 6 weeks, I went from 208 lbs in bodyweight to 228 lbs. And as an example in strength gain, I went from a 295 bench press for 1 rep to 350 lbs for 1 rep.
This is a VERY extreme example of training through muscle soreness and using maximum workout frequency. But the take-home lesson from it is this: you CAN get great results by training even when you're sore! Your body will react to the stress and ramp up recovery in response.
One quick tip: if you want to decrease post-workout soreness, try taking 500 mg of Vitamin C about an hour before your workout. This helps protect against muscle soreness.
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Nick Nilsson is Vice-President of the online personal training company BetterU, Inc. He has a degree in Physical Education and Psychology and has been inventing new training techniques for more than 16 years. Nick is the author of a number of bodybuilding eBooks including "Metabolic Surge - Rapid Fat Loss," "The Best Exercises You've Never Heard Of," "Gluteus to the Maximus - Build a Bigger Butt NOW!" and "The Best Abdominal Exercises You've Never Heard Of" all available (HERE).
He can be contacted at betteru@fitstep.com.

How to Build up Muscle - And Fast

So how do you build up muscle fast, well the first and most
important piece of equipment you will need is a FORK.

What do I mean? Well he most important thing you need to do
when trying to build up muscle is eat and not just your
average 3 meals a day, you need to be eating every 2-3
hours or as close as you can get to that. In order to build
mass you really should be looking to eat 6 times a day. You
need to be eating good food and not just any old junk. A
high protein diet is an important part of any weight
training course, crucially, protein derived from animal
sources. Building muscle is 80% food and 20% training.
Proteins that you need to get familiar with are those found
in things such as whey, beef, poultry, eggs and fish. Some
alternatives to these are bean curd, tofu and Soy protein.
Eating the right amount of foods all the time will force
your body to grow beyond what you may think feasible. The
diet also should contain a sufficient amount of
carbohydrates (rice, beans, oatmeal, potatoes, sweet
potatoes, bread, pasta, all cereals) and fat. Fruit and
Green vegetables should also be included.

The concentration on weight gain programmes must be on two
components, lifting heavy weights,which will stimulate the
largest amount of muscle fibre. Your body will react to
this stimulus by growing your muscle mass and secondly
eating more calories than you have before. When you
overload your bodies system with plenty of protein and
fats, your body has no other choice but to gain weight.
When you work with weights, you should try to eat about 30
grams of protein every meal. To allow your body to actually
take in and use the all the calories you will ingest, you
have to make your meal size smaller and increase the amount
of meals. Dividing your calories into smaller, more
frequent portions will enable food absorption and
utilization of nutrients.

High quality protein, which the body breaks down into amino
acids, should be the centrepiece of all your meals. Intense
exercise increases demand for amino acids, which support
muscle repair and growth.

The following are some proven basic exercises to encourage
muscle and strength gain unlike any other exercises.

Squats - legs, lower back

Dead lifts - legs, back, shoulders

Bench Presses - works the chest, shoulders, triceps

Pull-ups/Barbell Rows - back, bicep

Bar Dips -shoulders, chest, arms

Overhead Presses - shoulders, triceps

To build mass, you must use heavy weights. To consider a
weight heavy, you should only be able to do a max of 4-8
reps before your muscles momentarily fail. A weight is
considered 'light' if you can do more than 15 reps before
muscle tiredness sets in. Heavy weights will stimulate more
muscle fibres than light weights which result in more
muscle growth. Heavy weight training puts a huge strain on
your body, so adequate rest and recuperation after your
workouts is essential.

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pitfalls that virtually ALL beginners fall victim to...and
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