Safe Exercises To Getting Sexy Abs

Five pieces of fruit…before 10AM! Excessive?  Hinders fat loss results? Welcome to my morning ritual in which I indulge in a savory and nutritious blender drink ripened with a banana, and mixed berries, followed by apple soon thereafter.

Now many of you have probably heard that eating too much fruit will cause you to gain weight, but that is simply a load of BS! Find out why in last day’s interview excerpt with fitness expert, Scott Colby.

Flat, sexy abs. They may seem elusive, especially after spending countless hours doing crunches that leave you with nothing more than mediocre results or even worse, back pain. So today I’m sharing some of my beginner and advanced ab exercises that will make your abs sizzle, while also removing the boredom and often dangerous side effects of sit-ups and crunches.

Let’s get started…

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Scott Colby:  Nancy from Albany says, “I’m a 49 year old woman who has been following the Turbulence Training outline for two years. My diet is good, I cleanse once biweekly eating fruits and water for two week intervals, and then I resume my regular diet, which does not include any white flour, sugar, or carbonated drink products. However, my stomach is still fat and is just plain ugly. “What am I doing wrong?”

Craig Ballantyne: We always want to make sure we’re changing the program, which it sounds like she probably is if she’s using the Turbulence Training program. So, you definitely want to make sure that you’re changing the program every three to four weeks as you get more advanced.

If she’s ADVANCED she might want to switch up her program every three weeks instead of four weeks. That might be something that will kick start some results. In addition, we will want to really take a look at that diet.

It’s really kind of tough to analyze it right now without seeing everything that’s being consumed on a regular basis. But, she does make a great point that she’s doing really well with it. So, maybe it’s just changing the program a little more frequently that is going to help.

As long as she is making sure that she’s consuming lots of water, that’s another thing that we talked about in the Simple Nutrition. Women that were only consuming a liter of water per day were not losing weight and then when they added another liter of water they started to get the results.

There are some things to definitely take a look at, but it’s the kind of thing where you’d have to really sit down with somebody and review everything on a step by step, meal by meal basis. Hopefully, just the simple tip of changing things every three weeks will help her continue her progress there.

Scott Colby: That was my first thought. Let’s see… Heidi says, “Hi. I have a very sensitive stomach; therefore many stomach exercises cause me quite a deal of pain to get the results I want. I do crunches and sit ups.”

OUCH! It sounds like she is having some pain doing crunches and sit ups, these will cause pain. Planks and sit ups on the exercise ball are the least painful. Do you have any suggestions?

Craig Ballantyne: Again, if you want to have flat sexy abs…

…crunches and sit ups are way down on the list out of the top 75 things you can do. So it’s very low on your list of things you can do.

You want to make sure that you’re doing total body resistance & interval training to burn belly fat. Make sure that your nutrition is in place to help you keep the belly fat off and to burn the belly fat. These are the three MOST IMPORTANT things we need to do.

Now, when it comes to the abdominal exercises I use what is called TOTAL BODY abdominal exercises, none of them involve crunches. The MORE ADVANCED ones like the stability ball jack knife, stability ball rollouts, and stability ball plank involve the ball and are more difficult, but again we don’t spend 30 or 40 minutes on that type of stuff.

We barely spend 30 or 40 minutes on the entire workout, let alone the abdominal portion, which is only about five to seven minutes of the entire workout. We’re also are doing exercise like mountain climbers, cross body mountain climbers, planks and side planks as our BASICS for our beginners.

One thing that most people don’t know is when I was reading Dr. Stewart McGill’s books he recommends that everyone be able to hold a plank for TWO minutes, before they move on to anything else as a measure of healthy abdominal endurance and low back safety.

So, if you are not able hold a plank for two minutes straight with proper form then you definitely want to spend more time on that exercise. Side plank as well, and then move on to stability ball plank, which Men’s Health Magazine says works the abs 35 percent harder than a regular plank. Obviously, that’s a more advanced one.

Those are the types of exercises we do. None of them involve the crunching, so hopefully you should be able to do those exercises without the stomach pain. That is what is going to get more results.

Scott Colby: Jane in Wisconsin says, “Besides a modified plank what is the best beginner ab exercise for women with little to no abs successfully AND understand how to properly fire the abdominal muscles?”

Craig Ballantyne: That’s a great question. Here’s an interesting answer. When you’re working with your client’s one of the things to do, and obviously this will be requiring some communication, trust, and understanding, make sure that you put your hands or they can use their own hands, on the muscle that is supposed to be working.

Research shows that if you do that you will get the muscle to fire better than if there was no tactile stimulation, touching stimulation there. So, that’s one thing that she can do in every exercise.

In addition to that, you also want to teach her how to BRACE her abdominals. The simple instructional tool for this is to brace as if someone is going to punch you in the stomach. So, get her to visualize that and then she can touch her abs and she’ll be able to feel her abdominals that way.

She can be doing this while she’s doing the plank or a modified side plank, those are some basics. Also, I think she can do kneeling pushups, and you touch her abdominals. She should be able to feel her abdominals working.

Anytime, she’s doing an exercise it should be done with a braced set of abdominals, so you can just simply remind her to put her hands on that area  and just focus on BRACING and SQUEEZING. She should quite quickly increase her ability to recruit those muscles, then she’s going to be rocking and you’re going to be moving on to more advanced quite quickly.

Scott Colby: That’s awesome. That’s a great answer, because I know a lot of people can’t do a plank properly. That should help some of the beginners out there who are having a little bit of trouble.

Diet and meal planning is essential to help you lose weight. If you want a few great tips to encourage smart eating habits then jump to over to part 5.