The Six-Pack: Part 1

One of the few things the male and female species seem to have in common is the need to forge that ever elusive, chiseled mid-section. A perfectly toned torso that makes your ex regret s/he ever left you for that multi-millionaire who saves Africa in his spare time. Yet when I look around the gym, I rarely see any exercises that truly impress me. For the past few years, all I've really seen are crunches, swiss ball crunches, sit ups, a few planks here and there, and finally some ridiculous bosu ball balancing nonsense.

So how do you train to tone the torso? What exercises do you use? What do you do differently from the rest of the flock to accelerate your progress?

Read on.

The Sit-Up
The traditional sit-up involves lying face up on the floor and drawing the chest up to the knees whilst keeping the feet on the ground (ideally); and on first glimpse this seems a perfectly appropriate exercise to train the rectus abdominis. But low back pain guru, Stuart McGill, put out a book a few years ago that explained the folly of the sit-up. Until this time, it was axiomatic that the sit-up stimulated the abdominals over any other muscle. Instead, it appeared that it was the hip flexors (iliacus and psoas) that seemed to perform the most work to move the subject from initial position to the...sit-upped...position.

Now, let's assume that you're quite motivated to get that six-pack and you're performing around 100-150 situps a day (on the low end I'm sure for a lot of people). Chronic contraction of a 'postural' muscle results in a shortened muscle. Let's compound this with the fact that most of you sit at a desk all day with your hips..you guessed it - flexed! Common sense will tell you that over time, you're going to get some serious problems in that area.

But McGill's argument wasn't even this. He said that during the sit-up, the hip flexors actually use the spine as leverage to heave the upper extremity into the upright position. I don't know much, but I know I don't want my spine used like that.

So the bottom line is this - the risk to benefit ratio for the sit-up exercise is high enough to scratch it from your arsenal. It doesn't target the muscles you want to and it actually hurts you at the same time.

In the next article, we'll go over exactly what you need to do and how you need to do it.

An Aside on Diet
For best results, follow healthy eating habits. If you have no idea what that might be, check out this article, or this site. No supplements are required, but a proper whey protein powder is optional.