This abs workout will build off of our previous discussion on The Best Abdominal Exercises for Flat Abs. This post will focus on more advanced abdominal training for those people who have reached their flat abs goals and are looking for a rippling six pack. If you’re still striving to reduce belly fat then start with the previous post before applying what follows.

So let’s assume your abs have flattened a bit and the love handles are shrinking, but you have yet to bring out definition or tone. For most people the combination of interval and resistance training with a proper diet is more than enough to shred the abs. But there are a few of us that for whatever reason plateau once we near that elusive goal. So our workout plans need to adapt just as our bodies have in order to hit our abs with more intensity.

Let’s look quickly at the body of a sprinter versus the body of a marathon runner. Until recently (cross training is much more prominent these days) marathon runners tended to be slender, carry little muscle, and lack the detailed muscle tone we see in sprinters. And this had everything to do with the type of training. Sprinting requires and develops fast twitch muscle fibers, whereas jogging develops primarily slow twitch. This results in muscular hypertrophy in sprinters which builds their bodies and shows greater definition. This is what we are looking for.

Marathon runners by comparison, despite the fact that they run for hours on end and have lean midsections, rarely show the rippling six packs of sprinters. There are two reasons for this. The first, as I’ve just said is due to the fact that sprinting is a sport requiring fast twitch muscle fiber development resulting in larger muscles. The second reason is that sprinting stresses our nervous systems and muscles to a much larger degree, forcing the release of human growth hormone and other powerful fat burning and muscle building hormones. Jogging for long periods of time on the other hand can cause our bodies to release cortisol, a stress hormone which tells our bodies to store fat.

So if you’ve reached the point of flat abs, jogging and long cardio sessions may actually be detrimental to your progress. It’s important to recognize this peculiar hormonal response and utilize contrary training techniques in our ab workouts. We’ll need to stick to short and intense training sessions rather than longer cardio sessions, and we’ll need to concentrate a little more on exercises which stress our cores.

In my own training I reduce my abs workout (assuming, like I’ve said I’ve already reduced my belly fat and have just to bring out definition) to short intense abdominal exercises followed by short and intense interval training or sprinting. The abs exercises pre-exhaust my core before I sprint, and then running forces my core into overdrive to keep me stable while running. It also works supporting muscles that are hard to reach with normal abdominal exercises.

My preferred exercises at this level of training are those which draw more power from the lower abs through lifting the legs rather than those which concentrate on the upper abs through crunches. I do reclining leg raises on a decline bench or hanging (from pull-up bar) leg raises, for 3 to 4 sets of 10. You will not normally feel like you’ve exhausted your abs because these kinds of exercises rarely generate lactic acid to the same degree as a set of 20 crunches, but lactic acid is not an indication of muscular stimulation.

You’ll notice your work as soon as you step on the treadmill for your sprint session, and then days letter once your midsection has firmed. Once on the treadmill, warm up for 5 minutes with a moderate jog, and then either transition into the interval training I’ve outlined in Why Interval Training Needs to be a Part of Your Flat Abs Workout Plans or simply resolve yourself to 3 to 5 one minute sprints. By the end of the minute you should be close to failure, and you can rest 2 to 3 minutes between sprints by walking at a decent pace.

If added to your flat abs workout plans this abs workout done once or twice a week will turn your flat abs into rippling ones. It’s important to remember however that too much exercise is just as bad as too little. Your abs need time to recover and grow stronger, and any abs workout that is done intensely, should be done infrequently, once or twice a week max. A less intense abs workout can be performed three or four days a week, but in my opinion is less effective.

We’ve looked at flat abs workout plans already with little attention to diet. But no amount of effort in the gym is going to pay off if we refuse to alter our eating habits. The energy we put in our bodies is just as important, if not more so, than the energy we exert.

In keeping with the 80-20 rule, the most meaningful shift in our diets will come from controlling our intake of high glycemic carbohydrates and avoiding trans and hydrogenated fats. These carbs are easily recognizable because they taste great and are white. They include pastas, white breads, cookies, white rice, and potatoes, etc. We love eating these foods because the simple sugars that comprise them give us an immediate insulin surge and energy boost, which hours later results in an energy crash. Insulin tells our bodies to retain body fat.

The good carbs are known to all and come in the form of fruits, vegetables, and whole grains. These carbs take our bodies longer to break down and release energy at a slower pace, allowing our bodies to draw from fat stores for energy rather than flooding our bodies with the high concentration of energy and simple sugars from breads and pastas. You can change your diet to consist of mainly fruits, veggies, and lean meats, eat as much and as often as you want, and still find your body shedding weight and nearing your flat abs goals.

The quality of food we put in our bodies is so much more meaningful than the quantity. You can feel like you’re starving yourself, but if you’re eating the wrong kinds of food when you do it, your body will store it as fat. On the other hand, when eating a healthy diet of natural foods you can eat more and more often and still burn fat. The main reason being that fruits and vegetables, while rich in vitamins and minerals, are not calorie dense. It’s very hard to meet your caloric needs from a diet of only vegetables, and when you don’t consume adequate calories to meet your metabolic needs, your body will take the energy deficit from the only place it can…your body fat.

Flat abs is the inevitable outcome of returning to a natural food diet. Our bodies have evolved over millennia on food from the land, not processed foods with added sugars and flavors. Returning to a natural diet puts our hormones in balance and allows our bodies to function as they’re meant to…efficiently.

Protein is the last macronutrient we have yet to discuss, but its rarely an issue for those living in western and developed countries. Meats are commonplace and easy to come by, and as long as you try to consume some two to three meals a day you’ll be fine. Notice here I’m not discussing macronutrient quantity per meal. I’m doing that intentionally because I honestly believe it’s insignificant. When eating natural foods our bodies don’t need the caloric precision they need when we eat garbage because our hormonal response to healthy eating is a properly functioning and efficient body. It isn’t as sensitive to calorie fluctuations and in fact benefits from them.

This brings me to my last dietary recommendation, calorie shifting. This is where I give you a break. I know for most that a diet of natural foods sounds bland. But it doesn’t need to be. You can have a pretty diverse selection of great tasting and healthy foods if you dive in and make the lifestyle change. But nevertheless it may not serve to replace the psychological comfort of junk food. So here’s the catch, when you make the dietary changes above and are realizing gains in your flat abs battle, you can introduce a tactic known as calorie shifting.

A common problem with dieting is that in the beginning our bodies make up the caloric deficiency with body fat. But after some time our metabolism will acclimate to our new level of calorie consumption and downregulate. This means our metabolism will become lower to account for lower calories consumed. This is not good, as it means you’ll stop burning fat for energy. Most people come to the conclusion that they need to reduce there diet further and head down that path of starvation and long term metabolic destruction. What can we do about this? We can eat!! One day a week you can binge on absolutely anything.

Feel free to go out of your way to eat everything you love, ice cream, chips, chocolate, fudge, snickers. And don’t eat just some, eat till you feel sick. This has two great benefits. The first is it keeps our metabolism high by forcing it to deal with a massive surge of calories. This will allow you to burn fat consistently for months on end because when you hit your diet again the following six days your reduction in calories will be registered as a caloric deficit do to your consistently high metabolism. This deficit will continue to be met by burning belly fat for energy.

The second benefit is psychological. It’s hard to diet for the long term. Our minds crave those foods that make us feel guilty. Allowing ourselves that one day a week to binge is great for our mental health in that we don’t feel like we’re being deprived or sacrificing simple pleasures. It also makes us feel a little sick to our stomachs, and that will make it hard to think about or even look at comfort foods for days following the binge, removing all temptation of a little taste of chocolate. Who knew that binging would become your secret dietary weapon in the battle for flat abs.

Just so you don’t think we’re neglecting your abs, I’ll devote this post to abdominal exercises for flat abs. But before we get into specifics, I do want to reiterate that flat abs are not created in the gym, but in the kitchen. Belly fat alone is what causes the abs to bulge, and there are no abdominal exercises you can do to flatten your abs if they’re covered by a thick layer of padding.

The abdominals, even in well developed athletes are not big protrusive muscles. When they grow, they tend to widen more so than stick out. It’s the layer of belly fat covering these muscles that we really need to worry about if getting flat abs is our goal. But we’ve discussed this already and this is enough review. Let’s assume you’re watching your diet and are including resistance training and interval training in your flat abs workout plans already.

Then it’s only a matter of time before a little bit of extra abs training will make a difference in our midsection. Abdominal exercises should not be done compulsively or too frequently. Remember, they are muscles. And muscles all respond the same way to exercise. Intense exercise stimulates growth and requires rest in order to rebuild muscle and recover from your workout. So the principle of progressive overload applies to our abs as much as the rest of our body.

This means that in order to make gains in abdominal strength, we must increase the intensity of the exercise. If we increase the intensity, we must also DECREASE our frequency of training. I usually don’t train my abs more than twice a weak, and sometimes once or less. You see, the abs are stabilizing muscles, and so if you follow the interval and resistance training recommendations I’ve given, your abs are getting worked with nearly all your other training, and you’re well on your way to flat abs.

That said, if and when you do train your abs, there are some exercises that are more efficient than others, meaning more intense per time allotted. I’ll list some of those here, from beginner to intermediate levels:

Beginner
Crunches (done slowly with a 2 second pause at the crunched position)
Reclining Knee Crunches (lean back while sitting on a bench, support yourself with your hands and with your legs straight out pull your knees into a crunch.
Do 3 sets of 15 to 20 repetitions. Perform these 1 to 3 days a week, either after your resistance training or before your interval training. If all you’re looking for is flat abs, these abdominal exercises done once per week are sufficient. The following exercises are for flat abs and beyond. Warning, performing the following may result in a six pack.

Intermediate
Plank (from a pushup position, but support yourself with your forearms rather than your hands. Squeeze your abs and keep your whole body tight)
V-sits (start with body totally flat and hands extended behind head. Then curl whole body so hands touch feet with legs and arms straight.)
Plank on an exercise ball (Do the same plank as above, but elevate your feet and support yourself with your forearms on an exercise ball)
Perform the Plank for 1 minute at a time, rest for one minute and repeat 1 or 2 more times. The V-sits can be done in three sets of 10 to 20 repetitions. These exercises should be performed no more than 2 times per week.

Advanced
Hanging Knee Raises (hold onto a pull-up bar and curl your knees to your chest)
Hanging Straight Leg Raises
Perform three to five sets of ten repetitions. This should be done no more than two times per week, but one time should be sufficient for almost anybody.

So there you have it, beginning to advanced abdominal exercises guaranteed to strengthen the abs and bring the sexy. Keep in mind however that while these are great for bringing out definition and toning the midsection, they should be seen only as a supplement to diet, which is the leading cause of flat abs.

In the last post we discussed the many reasons full body resistance training ought to be included in your flat abs workout plans. In this post we’ll talk about the other side of the weight loss workout equation, interval training. But before we discuss how interval training flattens the abs, let’s look at how it differs from the traditional long cardio sessions. 

Traditional cardiovascular exercises like jogging, biking, and rowing at moderate speeds were considered the optimal ways to lose belly fat. The reason? Doing stuff for a long time burns more calories than not. Pretty simple. And most of us are aware that people that tend to do long cardio sessions on a regular basis tend to have flat abs. Why then would I recommend your workout plans take a different format that this? Because having flat abs and getting flat abs quickly are not the same thing.

First of all, it requires a great deal of strength and fitness to carry ones body at a moderate speed for 40 minutes to an hour without stopping. Most of us could not dream of this without considerable resistance training for strength and working up to that duration over several months. Fortunately for those of us who would want fast results and get bored with doing the same thing for an hour, long cardio sessions are not the quickest path to flat abs.

Interval training blows traditional cardio workouts out of the water when it comes to fat loss. Most of us know that if we walk quickly for an hour we burn around same amount of calories as if jog at twice the speed for a half an hour. So we try to take the easy way out and go the low impact route. What they don’t tell you is that calories burned while training isn’t the whole story. It is possible, and indeed probable with interval training, to burn fat around the clock from a 20 minute session rather than simply to burn calories while at the gym. This should excite those whose workout plans aim to produce flat abs in the shortest amount of time and with as little time training as possible.

Interval training is a combination of moderate and intense cardiovascular training within the same session. If running, a typical interval session may begin with a 5 minute warm up, followed by 3 to 5 sets of a 1 minute sprint (a speed you can sustain for only a minute to a minute and a half) 2 minute jog combo, and finally a cool down of 5 minutes or so. If you’re doing 3 sets of the interval segment, this workout takes less than 20 minutes. But this is an intense 20 minutes, and much harder than jogging for 40 minutes to an hour at moderate speeds; at least on the body if not the mind.

The real benefit of including interval training in your workout plans is that it puts your body in a fat burning state long after you’ve finished training, at times up to 48 hours after training. And assuming you have a healthy heart, interval training will serve to make it stronger, as well as tone the legs, midsection, and other locations with saggy skin. Clearly a fat burning program that works around the clock is more conducive to getting flat abs than 50 minutes of fat burning at the gym.

Our bodies will, after some time, adapt to out cardio training, just as it will to resistance training. The only way to avoid adapting, and so plateauing, is to increase the intensity or structure of the workout. Interval training allows us to structure and restructure our workout plans frequently in order to keep our bodies from adapting to workouts. This keeps the body growing, adapting, and drawing on stored body fat to meet inconsistent energy requirements.

So not only is interval training effective, it’s also efficient. Three to four sessions a week will result in flat abs in no time. It can be done by jogging outdoors, on an elliptical, circuit training with moderate weights, a bicycle, or kickboxing, so there is no good excuse not to include it in your flat abs workout plans.

Good flat abs workout plans will not actually focus on the abs. The abdominals are important muscles to develop, but they are unique in that they receive indirect stimulation from nearly every other exercise. Despite this fact though, people still attempt time and time again to bring out their abs through countless crunches. And again, if focused on sexy abdominals, flat abs workout plans must be designed to reduce all around body fat, rather than act as a one step solution to midsection woes.

So what do flat abs workout plans need to include exactly? There are two indispensable components of training for flat abs. The first is resistance training for muscle development and increased metabolic rate. And the second is interval training, which will be the key component in fat loss, as well as an over all metabolic supercharge. So what kinds of exercises are best for resistance training?

The best kinds of exercises for all around fitness, and for flat abs in particular, are total body compound movements. In fact, there are probably only 5 essential lifts that take care of more than 80 or 90 percent of your resistance training needs. These 5 will stimulate virtually every major muscle group, as well as most stabilizing muscles. The easiest way to conceive of them is by understanding what our bodies are designed to do.

Our chests, arms, and back, are designed to push and pull respectively. Our legs are designed to squat and stand, and our shoulders are designed to lift our arms over our heads. The 5 major lifts work every muscle involved in these basic movements. The first lift is the good old fashioned bench press… or pushups for someone with less strength. For the back one can choose either pull-ups or bent over rows. The arms are worked in both of these movements, as the triceps support the pushing movement, and the biceps support the pulling movement.

For the legs we use the squat. This can be done with bodyweight or a bar bell. Your body should drop so that your thighs are parallel with the floor. This exercise works every major muscle group in the legs. This exercise is supplemented with the dead lift, a total body lift which provides the simple task of picking heavy things up off the floor safely. This exercise works the hamstrings and quads, the lower, middle, and upper back, and the traps.

And the last lift is the shoulder or military press. Grab a barbell and starting at your collarbone, push the bar straight overhead. These 5 exercises, if done in sets of 3, 8 to 12 repetitions, are enough for anyone to stimulate muscle growth as well as set the path for flat abs. At more advanced levels these exercises should be combined into supersets, where two exercises are performed back to back before a 1 minute rest is taken.

Notice here that I don’t have any abdominal exercises. That is because they are rather unnecessary in producing flat abs. Low body fat is 95% of the flat abs game. And if you reach a low enough body fat, abdominal exercises may help you to build a little shape, but they will not help you flatten the midsection. In the next post we’ll look at the other component of our flat abs workout plans, interval training.