The abdomen is the front of the core and it is mainly in charge of transmitting and absorbing forces. It is essential that we take it into account in our training since we usually train it with shrink exercises and forget that it is not its main task. There are other mistakes when it comes to training our abdomen. Which are? How do we avoid them?
The frequent mistakes we make when training the abdomen and their solution
The abdomen remains stable while the rest moves
In any sporting gesture we need to move the limbs, being the abdomen is in charge of transmitting the forces between the upper and lower body. To visualize it, it is enough to imagine different sports such as running where we continually move our legs and arms, but the abdomen remains “without movement”.
To enhance that function Avoid focusing your training on typical abdominal crunches. That does not mean that we should discard them completely, simply know what percentage we give to exercises where the trunk remains immobile while the extremities move, or on the contrary, it is the trunk that moves.
A classic and basic example is a front or side plank in which we lift a leg or a hand from the ground, while our trunk should not move from the place. On the contrary, we have all the trunk shrinkage in any of its variants.
The abdomen follows the principles of training like any other muscle
When you perform a bicep curl, you will likely train in a range of six to 15 repetitions. Why then do you do sets of 30 sit-ups or more? Following that criterion, there are exercises such as squats where we load more weight and perform fewer repetitions. Isn’t the abdomen made up of muscles like the legs?
Treat your abdomen the same way as your biceps or quadriceps, doing exercises that involve intensity and in which you can progress. An exercise as simple as working the abdomen with an abdominal wheel can be very complicated and take you to the limit.
The recovery of the abdomen is according to your training
The simple fact of standing up already makes our abdomen activate, so it is a muscle group that works every day. It is different to train it intensely, as we have talked about in the previous section.
Must give it enough encouragement and recover from it. That allows us to train him two or three times a week to have a balance between stimulus and rest. Avoid working the abdomen daily at low intensity because it is not the ideal way to achieve a strong abdomen.
Crunches to appear “the tablet”
Yes and no. Like any muscle, the abdomen needs to develop to increase its muscle mass. For this we will follow the previous tips. Once we have developed them, they will not be visible if we have a layer of fat that covers them.
This layer of fat will not be eliminated by many thousands of daily sit-ups that we perform. Hence the saying that “abs are made in the kitchen”, which gives us a perspective of what we are talking about, although it is not 100% true.
We can give that phrase a twist and propose the following: “abs are done in the gym and put on the showcase in the kitchen”. Therefore, train your abdomen to increase its muscle mass and decrease your fat mass to show them.
A long list of attractive exercises that does not allow us to know our progress
When we go to train chest at the gym we can find many exercises, but in the end if we analyze them biomechanically they are summarized in a few. With abdominal exercises we can lose ourselves between long lists of exercises all types.
Being novel they do not attract and we want to try them. That does not allow us to progress in each of it. Our advice is that choose a very small number of exercises and progress on them.
An exercise like the well-known dragon flag it may be one of them. Start doing it according to your possibilities and progress on it. We advance you that you have work with him and maybe in a year you will realize what you are reading now.
To cover the abdomen in its entirety you need a complete workout
Strength, power and stability are the three qualities with which the abdomen is improved and it makes our performance improve as well. Both on an aesthetic level and on a sports level, we must cover the training of the abdomen from these three perspectives.
The strength is worked with isolated demanding abdominal exercises, but also with exercises such as squats, the thrusts above the head and everything that implies that this part is activated, either directly or indirectly.
The abdominal power is trained with explosive movements such as throwing a heavy ball to the wall, or exercises performed at high speed on a pulley or with a rubber band.
The Stability is the one we train the most with exercises such as isometric planks in all their variants. The mistake is to stay only in this quality and not take advantage of the wide range of training of the abdomen with power and strength exercises.
If we want strong abs, we must give it a preferential place in training
The abdominals usually occupy the gaps “left free” in the training program. On Monday we go straight to the bench press, then we do a little arm and if we have time and energy we do sit-ups. You know where I’m going, right?
For a strong abdomen we must alternate priority groups, doing the exercises for this muscle group in the first part of the workout just like we would do with the shoulders or the gluteus.
In turn, we must bear in mind that If the training has technical exercises such as squats or deadlifts, it is not advisable to fatigue the abdomen first, since it will be vital for the execution of these very technical exercises. But in the rest of the sessions, the abdomen can occupy the first positions of exercises in the training.
In Vitónica | Five exercises to train your core at home: rectus abdominis, obliques, lumbar and transverse
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