A Six Pack Abs Lesson From A Gymnast

Who doesn’t love to watch the Summer Olympics every four years? I know I do! I always love to see the performances of these highly trained athletes but can’t help but notice the amazing abdominals amongst the gymnasts. Although many gymnast are blessed with great genes I highly doubt they were born with amazing six pack abs. A chizzled mid-section takes a lot of work, even for an Olympic athelete.

Olympic athletes are the epitome of fit bodies so why is it that their training methods are overlooked when we want to learn how to get six pack abs?

All you have to do is start your workout with three back flips everyday–okay, just making sure you’re paying attention. Although we don’t need to do everything a gymnast would do in their daily routine we should examine some of the workout regimine to see what we could bring into our own routines.

Throughout my years of training and research I have spent a great deal of time at Olympic training centers and have come to realize that they don’t perform typical ab workouts; I did notice that they perform two specific ab exercises on a regular basis which are listed below:

1. The Hanging Leg Raise: With an overhead grip, grasp a chin bar. Raise your legs up until your shins are almost touching the bar–ensure you initiate movement with your abdominals. Return while controlling the movement until your hips, waist and knees are fully extended. Repeat.

2. The V-Sit Up- Lie down on the floor or mat with arms extended overhead. Raise torso and legs at the same time while reaching hands towards feet. Return body to starting position and repeat.

Olympic gymnasts work their abs directly and indirectly. The workouts listed above are direct workouts but they also work their abs indirectly with total body movements.

The take home lesson here is simple: we must perform full body movements that require our abs to stabilize our torso. These exercises never involve using a fancy seat, bench or back/chest support. Let me give you 3 examples of exercises that incorporate full body movements, so you can get started right away.

1. Ditch the bench press for suspended push ups. When you lie on your back on a bench, your abs basically go to sleep. The opposite is true with suspended push ups. In addition to working your chest, shoulders and triceps, this exercise works the abs significantly better than most direct ab exercises.

2. Forget the pulldown for chin ups. Much like when you lie on a bench, when you sit on a pulldown seat your abs don’t work at all. However, when doing a chin up your abs are really fired up!

3. Ditch the leg press for tuck jumps. Just like the bench press, the leg press puts your abs to sleep because of the bench support. But the leg press even has a second strike against it. Since the sled is on guiding rods that only allow it to move linearly, no stabilization or support is needed from your abs. Tuck jumps, on the other hand, provide a great leg workout AND a great ab workout in one single exercise.

The great thing about these workouts is that you are really killing two birds with one stone because you’re getting a total body workout while really working your abs. If you follow my suggestions I can guarantee you’ll get ripped abs faster than ever! Click here to learn how to get a six pack as fast as possible with John Alvino’s secret six pack abs exercises.