Lady Abs: Get a Set of Your Own.

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Most women don’t consider a six-pack an attainable(or sometimes even desirable) achievement. But no matter what your stance on it is, having visible abs is a sign of a lean healthy physique, and a lot of hard work.
And not hard work in the “I just had a hard day at work” or “washing these dishes is so hard!” or “it’s so hard to walk on the treadmill for an hour“. I’m talking bring-me-the-puke-bucket-hard, my-brother-decided-to-become-a-juggalo hard, or robot-Dick-Cheney-is-chasing-me-through-Cleveland-at-night hard. THAT STUFF IS HARD.

One of the first requirements for being able to see your abs is actually having abs. This is an issue for a lot of ladies, as doing yoga, and being able to hold the boat position for 2 minutes does not actually guarantee you a set. In fact, when I have a lot of my female clients who profess to have ‘strong cores’ do any kind of abdominal exercise that isn’t isometric (holding a single position) most start to cry, while flinging their Starbucks frappachino at me with a limp wrist-ed toss that’s indicative of a weak core.

All this to say, there’s only 2 reasons you don’t have abs now:

1) Your abs aren’t defined enough
2) You aren’t lean enough

This is fixable in three fairly difficult steps:

1) Develop your abs
2) Start doing more exercises geared toward fat loss/lean muscle gain
3) Clean up your diet.

Let me expound each one.

1) Develop your abs.
Do not attempt to develop your abs by doing a million crunches every time you go to the gym. Not good for your back and not the most effective way of sculpting your brand new abdomen. If I hear one more person tell me about how many crunches Jet Li did, and how his abs were amazing, I’m going papercut my eardrums until I can’t hear anything. Ever. He had amazing abs, yes, but his spine also looked like this:

Instead, the exercises you should be doing are:

Hanging leg lifts
Ab Wheel Roll outs
Palloff Presses (youtube it)
Cable rotations
Russian Challenge Planks.
Dragon Flags (a la Rocky IV)

These are the ones that keep your spine in alignment, but still make your abs feel like they’re being carved with a soldering iron. (that means it’s working!)

2) Start doing more exercises geared toward fat loss/lean muscle gain

Get off the treadmill and hit some weights. You’re really starting to piss me off about this one. Do squats, deadlifts, Cleans, presses and rows. Don’t rest a lot. Make sure you’re sweating. This jacks up your metabolism, and incinerates fat. Do this 3 times per week. Then walk for an hour 4 times per week. NEXT.

3) Clean up your diet.

This is the most important one. Jack Lalane once said “If a man made it, don’t eat it.” If you’re ever planning on having abs, stop having: cheesecake, frozen dinners, pasta, burgers, french fries, late night snacks.
Eat carbs within 90 minutes of your workout and in the morning. Other than that, lean meat and veggies. I’m making this easy for you!
Also, for you naysayers out there who don’t want to lose weight to get abs because you don’t want to ‘look anorexic’ Don’t worry. There’s a big difference.

You’re welcome.

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