Building A STRONG Core

What’s having a set of RIPPED and SHREDDED abs if their WEAK???

In this day and age, ab training is all the hype!  You see a new toy come out just about every week.

Most of these gadgets are worthless!  They do nothing to build up your core strength!

And if you’re an athlete and you compete in sports, having a solid, and strong core is everthing!  Your core strength will have crossover into everything you do!

Sprinting, jumping, lateral movements, pushing, pulling, ect.

When I was younger, I can remember doing heavy weighted crunches by holding logs across my chest back when I had an ab bench at home in the garage.  I would also do “rocky abs” off of the bench as well!  My dad told me to do those all the time!   So I did!

I can also remember doing a countless amount of reverse crunches and Torso Track rollouts as well!

My older sister had this piece of ab training equipment called “The Torso Track”.  I used that thing everyday in high school!

When I would come home for lunch, I made it a rule to do 100 roll outs before I could eat.  It wasn’t the best ab training tool out there but I can tell you it help strengthen my core a bit!

Now I stick to regular wheel rollouts or rollouts with the Power Wheel.

BUT, you don’t need all of those types of tools to build strong abs.  What you need are the basics!!!

Bottom line – You’ve  got to be STRONG!!  It’s better than being WEAK!

IN this post, I want to talk about a few different ways you can build up a solid base for your core so you can BE STRONG.

With building a strong core, you need to start with the basics.  Too many people want to jump right in and do all the fancy movements.

I’ll tell you that building a STRONG and RIPPED core all starts with being able to brace and lock in your abs.

SIDE NOTE – I’ll be 110% upfront with you right now.  I am NOT a scientific type of guy.  Actually, I hate all the scientific mumbo-jumbo.   I had enough of that in college.  If you’re looking for all the cool looking diagrams with pictures or wanting a list of all the abdominal muscles and where they attach to on the body and which ones flex and extend and rotate,  so on and so forth, I’m sorry, you’ll NEVER find it coming from me!

If you want to know that stuff, I would look else where.  I’m a more practical kind of guy 😉

Ok, so now that we have that outta the way, when you’re talking about building your abs from the gorund up, first you have to be able to “lock em in”.  I say this to my athletes and clients to let them know to engage their abs.

If you can imagine a guy or gal is going to punch you in the stomach, you would want you to “brace” your abs for contact or else you’re going to get the wind knocked right out of you!   When you “brace” , you’re “locking em in”.    So keep that in mind.

Now that most basic ab exercise I always have my clients and athletes start out on is the basic plank.  From there, there are tons of progressions you can do to increase the intensity of the exercise.

The main thing is that your abs are “locked in” for the whole duration of the exercise.  A good rule of thumb before progressing to the next level on these is to be able to hold or “lock in” your abs for at least 60-90 secs.

When you do that, you can progress to new levels.

Here’s a quick video of some unique progressions…

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVz-KP3H2QI[/youtube]

Now, the movements in the video are your basic front planks.  There are side planks and reverse planks as that you’ll want to do as well.  You’ve got to make sure to get all 360 degrees of your core, not just the front 90 degrees.

In a later post, I will take you through some more unique “side plank” and reverse plank progressions to help build you a STRONG CORE!

Let’s get SHREDDED!

Please leave your QUESTIONS and COMMENTS!