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5 Abs That Don’t Work
By doing them, you will never get a slender waist.
Fitness is not a magic wand. To get a slender figure, you need to understand which exercises will benefit, and also monitor their correct implementation. That is why a flat stomach often remains a dream, even for those who regularly and do not spare themselves in the gym.
The abs are two layers of muscles: superficial and inner. Internal muscles (transverse and internal oblique) are more responsible for a flat stomach. Thoughtlessly “pumping the press”, we will not tighten the sagging tummy. To make the dream come true, together with fitness trainer Svetlana Horuzha, we will analyze the most popular, but absolutely useless exercises for the press.
1. Crunch on the press
Classic crunches increase the volume and mass of the abdominal muscles, mainly the external ones. This means that the girth of the stomach visually increases, and this is not a story about a flat female tummy, you must agree.
If you are the owner of a slender physique and you have no more than 1 cm of extra fat, then crunches will help create cubes on your stomach (they will become more pronounced). To do this, replace the classic curl with a low one. Make sure that your lower back is firmly pressed to the floor, your stomach is pulled in, your shoulders are slightly raised above the floor.
2. “Bicycle” and “scissors”
Exercises known from physical education lessons at school will not help if you decide to have a flat tummy. In these exercises, the external muscles are again loaded. You feel tension in your abdominal muscles and even pain, but this is not the way to a flat tummy.
3. Raises straight legs on the floor or hanging
Exercise will not tighten the abdomen and will not help with a stretched abdominal wall or prolapse of organs (which causes the abdomen to bulge out). By loading the rectus abdominis muscle, training it, additional volume of the abdominal muscles is created, but not a flat stomach.
4. Side bends with weights
Forget about side bends with weights: dumbbells, kettlebells and pancakes! The waist from such power bends will not narrow, the “sides” will not go away from this. On the contrary, visually “pumped up” oblique muscles will expand the waist area, rather than narrow it. The silhouette will turn into a “straight”, without attractive feminine curves.
5. Lifting the body from the floor with weight
Disks, dumbbells, any weight are not helpers. This strength exercise pumps the rectus abdominis muscle. The exercise could have created the cherished cubes, if not for the layer of subcutaneous fat, under which the cubes are not visible. Slow lifts with weight create a dense, bulky stone press. This exercise is useless for a flat stomach, as the volume of the abdomen does not go away.
The takeaway is clear: Choose exercises that work out the deepest layers of your muscles. The right exercises will improve your abs without pumping, strengthen your internal muscles, and result in a flat stomach.