Five reasons your ab results have plateaued

If you haven’t been seeing the results you’d expect in your ab workout try these five tips.

1.Resistance Training
Abdominal training is usually correlated with pumping out crunches in the mat area until you can no longer move.  The truth is, this type of fast paced repetition extensive training is by no means the most efficient way to kick start your abdominal results. This type of training might burn a few additional calories but in terms of building up the strength of your core resistance training needs to be added to your routine. Let me elaborate, when you think of building up your biceps or your pectoralis major you may think of using heavier weight or just weight in general besides your own body resistance. Your abdominal muscles are no different and should be treated like every muscle group in the body. They should not be left until the end of the routine, but instead be fully incorporated into your weekly program.

2. Change Up the Stimulus
Our bodies are smarter than we think and can quickly adapt to the same old stimulus’ we apply on ourselves during our workouts. When it comes to breaking out of your training plateau different forms of training become even more crucial. Changing up the stimulus on your abdominal muscles can come in many different forms including incorporating different lifting techniques like isometric training as well as negatives. As well as pairing these techniques with weights including dumbbells and barbells, cables, body resistance combinations as well as machines. Our abdominal muscles should be worked from different angles such as declined and add different trunk rotations to the exercises. This way we can target muscle groups like the obliques and upper abs of the serratus to really carve out your abdominals shape.

3. Time Under Tension
One of the biggest problems that might be affecting your ab results is not slowing the exercises down but rather furiously going through the exercises. The main problem with this is that the fast pace movement takes away from the pure isolation on the abs and turns most of the movement into just momentum. One key point to breaking down your muscles is time under tension. Slow the exercises down and focus on maximizing both the extension phase of the exercise as well as holding the contractions.

4. Nutrition
As you might have heard in the past nutrition definitely plays a large part in the equation to getting the physique you aspire for. Working out is nothing more than the initial stimulus you place on your body, outside of the gym with proper rest and nutrition is where you get the real results. You can have the strongest core in the world but that layer of subcutaneous fat covering your stomach is hindering you from that full potential. One of the most important factors when it comes to lean muscle mass is a high protein nutrition plan incorporated with your resistance training program. This mixed with slow digesting complex carbs and healthy fats will help those abs start peeking through.

5. Recovery
So now that we are starting to train the abs like every other muscle group, which can vary in terms of duration and frequency, they need to get the proper recovery in order to build back up. When we are in the gym we are placing stress on these muscle groups and causing them to go into a catabolic break down state. This is why a healthy lifestyle outside the gym is so important because this is where those muscles build back up into that sculpted core you’re looking for. Allow roughly 48 to 72 hours of recovery time after a hard resistance core session. By working the abdominals every day we are not allowing for efficient recovery time.