10 Biggest Ab Workout Mistakes
Article by Six Pack Abs Tv
Why is it that everyone is working out to get 6-pack abs, but almost no one has a flat stomach or defined abs? It’s because most people are making big mistakes in their ab workouts. Here are the 5 biggest mistakes that you are making that lead to injury, ineffective workouts, and little results. If you fix these mistakes, you’ll double the effectiveness of your workouts and you’ll be a lot closer to getting the abs you want.
Mistake #1 – You have no intensity in your ab workouts.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s hard to do hundreds and hundreds of crunches and you can get a burn in your abs, but that doesn’t mean the ab workout is intense. What you need to do to get more 6-pack abs results in less workout time is to increase the intensity of the ab exercises you use.
For example, most folks do hundreds of crunches but don’t get results. On the other hand, if you increase the intensity of the ab exercises you use, therefore decreasing the number of repetitions you can do in each set, you’ll put more stress on the muscle and force more change in your abs.
So get rid of the crunches and add exercises like Stability Ball Rollouts to your workouts, which you can’t do hundreds of times. Get rid of lying reverse crunches and use hanging knee raises – with good form – instead and do sets of 8-12 repetitions rather than sets of 30-50 reps.
Mistake #2 – You do too many crunches with bad form leading to a pain in the neck.
At first I thought this was just an occasional rookie ab workout mistake, but I’ve found more and more people are searching the Internet looking for pain relief because their necks are sore from doing too many crunches the wrong way. The best way to avoid neck pain from crunches is to avoid the exercise in the first place. Crunches are a waste of your time. For all the time people spend doing crunches, they don’t get a proportional improvement in their 6-pack abs. Don’t spend any more ab workout time doing crunches. Instead, use more effective exercises such as Cable Abs, Stability Ball Rollouts, Stability Ball Jackknives, and Hanging Knee Raises.
Mistake #3 – You do too many exercises where you round your back in spinal flexion
Have you or a friend ever injured your back by bending over? That movement is called spinal flexion, and can lead to herniated discs because every time your round forward, bend over, or round your back, you compress the intervertebral discs between the vertebral bones in your spine. It’s like squeezing down on one side of a giant hamburger and having the condiments come out the other side. Essentially, that’s what happens when you herniated a disc or get a bulging disc. So you need to avoid exercises that require spinal flexion, such as crunches or sit-ups to protect your back.
Mistake #4 – You do not brace your abs in every exercise.
When training clients, I tell them before each and every exercise to “brace their abs as if someone was about to punch them in the stomach”. Bracing your abs protects your back, and also works your abs, so that every exercise in your workout becomes an ab exercise. It is a simple, easy to remember tip that will help you strengthen your back and get six pack abs.
Mistake #5 – You don’t train your abs for endurance to help your low back.
While it is important to add resistance and intensity to the exercises in your ab workout, research also shows that you need to build endurance with basic abdominal exercise holds like Planks and Side Planks. Dr. Stuart McGill, a leading expert in low back fitness and performance, has found that the more endurance men and women have in these ab exercises, the lower their risk of back problems. Surprisingly, these exercises are also helpful in building a set of 6-pack abs and you can do the Plank exercises on a daily basis in ab workouts to build your endurance. Beginners should start with 10 second holds, while advanced fitness levels can do longer holds (up to 2-minutes for the Plank) or a series of repetitions of 10 second holds for each exercise. Both are effective ways to build abdominal muscle endurance.
Mistake #6 – Too many repetitions
Most of people think that doing hundreds and hundreds of repetitions of certain exercise will make them stronger and get results, but that’s not the case. If you want to lose belly fat and get a perfect six pack abs you need to add some intensity and resistance training. Doing exercises with more intensity will get you more and faster results in less time. Isn’t that great?! So when you do six pack exercises use some weights, cables, ankle weights to ramp up intensity. It’s recommended that beginners do 1-3 exercises for 1 or 2 sets, and more advanced can do 3-4 exercises for 3 or 4 sets keep you super strong. Remember, quality over quantity!
Mistake #7 – Doing too many crunches
One of the biggest mistakes that people do when it comes to abdominal training is doing too many crunches. Problem is that crunches don’t work enough muscle and certainly don’t burn enough calories, and often you end up with lower back and neck pain. If you want to burn more body fat and get ripped abs you should do full body workouts. Some of exercise you can incorporate in your fat loss workouts routine are bicycle crunch , plank, hanging leg raise and mountain climbers.
Mistake #8 – Doing ab exercises every day
This is a myth. If you do exercises for abs or any other muscle group every day, all you can get is soreness and you or your abs get overtrained and eventually you could hurt your abs. You really don’t wanna see that happen. Abs need rest and recovery. Muscels can’t grow if you don’t give them time to rest and recover. So, what I recommend is that you do abdominal workuts three times per week, that’s enough to get perfect abs. Also, these workouts should be done on nonconsecutive days. So, don’t train your abs every day.
Mistake #9 – Working out with machines
Honestly, I really don’t like ab machines. Yes, ab machines can help you get a six pack abs, but the problem with machines is that exercising with them doesn’t allow body to do naturally movements what can lead to injuries. Also, machines won’t help you reduce body fat. If you want those six packs to show, first you need to reduce overall body fat to around 10%. Doing some of cardiovascular exercises helps a lot. Most people don’t realize that, so they quit exercising. I’m pretty sure that you don’t want to be the one who quits.
Mistake #10 – No progress in ab exercises
One of common mistakes that many people do is doing same ab workouts over and over again for months. That is wrong and surely not effective. Training that way you won’t see any or very little progression. Human body adapts quickly, so if you want to lose body fat and get good abdominals you need to challenge your body in other way. This means that you need to do more sets or use weights to add some intensity and resistance into your ab training from time to time (usually every 3-4 weeks, but real sign of no progress is when workouts become easy). So, when you feel that workouts you’ve been doing are becoming easy, the time has come to change something little bit.
Avoid these 10 ab workout mistakes and you’ll double the effectiveness of your ab workouts. Add interval training and resistance training and you will soon have a flat stomach and visible abs.
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