Participants: Dick Nunez, Miles Scruggs, Jim Hillman
Series Code: BAS
Program Code: BAS000051
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00:15 Stay tuned for Body and Spirit. Today we're going to talk about
00:18 how to train the abdominal wall. 00:20 ¤ ¤ 00:48 Hello, I'm Dick Nunez, Wellness Director of the Black Hills 00:51 Health and Education Center. Welcome to Body and Spirit. 00:54 Today we're going to be talking about a topic that everybody 00:57 likes to know about and that's how to train the abdominal area. 01:00 We all like to have nice tapered abdomens. In fact, the Bible 01:03 talks about where the Apostle Paul says, Everything is 01:06 permissible but nothing shall have a mastery over me. So we 01:09 know if we get too large of an abdomen that something has 01:11 happened. Either we're eating improperly or we're not 01:14 exercising enough or we simply have very bad posture. We know 01:17 that there are a great walls in this world but we don't want our 01:21 abdomen to be one of them. So what's the key to abdominal 01:24 training. We're going to explore that now. So let's get started. 01:29 Today joining me will be Miles and Jim. Once again, whenever 01:34 we exercise, it's very important that we do the entire body so 01:39 we're going to loosen up a little bit before we start. 01:40 We're going to do some nice easy arm swings, up and around, just 01:48 to get the shoulders loose and get the blood circulating. Okay, 01:56 now let's go the other direction Nice good full circles as we 02:06 bring it around. Let's do about 3 more. Okay, good. Now as we 02:12 get into our exercise today we're going to start with the 02:16 larger muscle groups again. We're going to start with the 02:20 chest area and to do that we're going to do some pushups today. 02:22 I know that's your favorite so let's go ahead and get in a push 02:25 up position. Remember whenever we do pushups there are several 02:28 ways we can do it. Okay, go ahead and start doing some 02:30 repetitions fellows. We can do this like we're doing here which 02:33 is called the military push up or oftentimes people refer to 02:37 to it as men's style pushups. We can do them off the knees, 02:40 which we refer to oftentimes as ladies pushups or we can 02:43 just do them against the wall and anybody can do a push up 02:46 against the wall. It's not difficult at all. So for those 02:49 at home, if this is too difficult, just go ahead and do 02:52 them off a wall and that'll be just fine. Okay. What I'd like 02:56 you to do Miles, why don't you drop to the knees and keep going 03:01 Okay and this just gives you a modification of the push up done 03:05 off the knees, which is easier and as you get stronger you 03:08 might find you go from the wall to the knees and then finally 03:11 you get to a point where you can just do regular pushups. 03:15 I've seen this happen many times even for women who think that 03:18 they shouldn't ever be doing men's pushups, I've seen women 03:21 easily do 20 and 30 and even 40 pushups. If they simply 03:24 practice them a little bit they are amazed at how much stronger 03:27 they can actually become. Okay, let's keep going. We want to get 03:30 a few more in there so we get to a point of some sense of fatigue 03:34 Remember the body has a stimulus throughout. It's called a 03:37 systemic affect; we train an area, the whole body is affected 03:41 so even though they are doing pushups right now and they are 03:44 working on the chest and the upper arms what we're actually 03:47 doing is stimulating fat metabolism throughout the entire 03:50 body as the body randomly takes fat from whatever area it wants 03:55 to do. Okay, I think we've got about 5 more in us. There's 1, 04:01 and 2, good, 3 more times and up, 2 more, oh we're looking 04:07 good. One more time. All right good job Jim, good job Miles. 04:12 Okay, up on the feet. Okay, let's stretch the chest out now. 04:18 Okay just reach back. Feel that chest stretch and bring it 04:27 across. Okay, again reach back. Feel that chest stretch and 04:36 it across. Okay, good. Okay Miles if you'll get our towels 04:45 for us over there. We'll use those for a couple more 04:48 exercises here. Thank you. Okay we just worked the chest. 04:53 We talked before about how important it is to work the 04:58 antagonistic muscle group to whatever area we're working so 05:01 we just worked the chest so we want to work the back as well. 05:04 And we'll be talking about that as we get more into the 05:06 abdominal training today as well So what we're going to do is 05:10 we're going to reach out, grab the towel and we're going to 05:15 pull into us and then reach out and pull and reach and pull and 05:22 reach, pull and reach, pull. Okay, let's keep it going here. 05:28 The area we're working on is the latissimus dorsi. Bend over just 05:33 a little bit more. If we look here at Jim we can see this 05:39 area working as he pulls out. Try and stretch way out so you 05:45 feel that, get an extended contraction of that latissimus 05:51 area. Good. Okay, let's reverse arms and go the other way. 05:58 Let's rotate your bodies. These muscles are so important to help 06:06 us stand properly. Good posture is a key to good health. These 06:11 muscles are often times let go and as you can see over here 06:15 on Miles again, you see this muscle stretching. A lot of 06:20 times when you talk about this muscle, people will check back 06:23 there and they'll say we don't even have one of those back 06:25 there. Well we all have them. It's just if they don't get 06:28 developed you'll lose them and if you lose them it's going to 06:32 create problems for your posture your structure and make you more 06:38 susceptible to injury. Okay good let's go ahead and relax. Put 06:42 your towel down for a moment. Now let's stretch that area out. 06:47 Arms up over the head and pull and as you do that again you 06:53 should feel that stretching through this area. Good. 06:56 Looks good. You've got good flexible shoulders. All right, 07:02 switch it over. Again we see the stretch of the latissimus dorsi 07:11 area. Okay good. Pick your towels back up. We're going to 07:17 do a shoulder press with the towels. And what we're going to 07:21 do is we're going to pull it apart like we're trying to tear 07:25 it and we're going to press it up overhead keeping the 07:29 contraction of the shoulders while we do it. Okay? Pressing 07:34 up. Bring it back down. The whole time we're keeping tension 07:41 on the towel. The whole time we have tension on the towel. This 07:47 will give us a good stimulation of our shoulder area. For those 07:52 at home, the harder you pull the harder it will be. If it's 07:56 difficult for you to even do this simply use a towel as a 08:01 vehicle to help you get your arms up over your head. 08:03 It's very important to be able to move those arms up and down. 08:07 Just doing simple things like reaching up and taking a can off 08:11 of a shelf or picking up a bag of groceries or picking up a 08:15 grandchild. It's really sad when you think about the fact people 08:20 over the age of 75, 2/3 of all women and 1/4 of all men can no 08:24 longer pick up 10 pounds and that's so sad. Then when you 08:27 couple that with the fact that only 10 per cent of people over 08:31 the age of 65 even have a regular exercise program and you 08:34 can see now why people are in such bad shape and heading for 08:38 nursing homes and rehabilitative centers. But there's good news 08:42 out there. They've taken people in their 80's and 90's that have 08:45 been in nursing homes, get them on the exercise program and some 08:48 of these people end up walking out of the nursing homes because 08:51 now they're getting strong and healthy again and can take care 08:53 of themselves. This type of exercise is just the key to 08:57 something like that. Okay, now just hold it over the head and 09:03 pull hard apart. Okay, let's slowly bring it down. As we do 09:09 it we're still pulling apart. Good, all the way back down. 09:15 Now let's go back up again. Keep pulling apart as you're going. 09:22 And back down. Keep pulling it apart. Keep that tension on it. 09:30 Okay, up again. Good, we're looking good. One more time 09:37 back down. Okay good. Okay go ahead and put the towels off 09:44 to the side. Now we're going to stretch the shoulder area out. 09:49 So we're going to take one arm, bring it across and feel it 09:55 stretch. Now the other side. Once again, we hold our 10:09 stretches for about a 10-15 second time period. Okay good. 10:17 Go ahead and relax. Okay, we're going to do some biceps training 10:21 now. We're going to do this simply like we used to do back 10:24 in the old body building days. We're going to reach out. We're 10:28 going to flex the muscles down and reach out. Flex and reach. 10:36 Flex and reach, flex and out and flex and out. Good. Keep the 10:44 elbows up as we squeeze the biceps down. Good. Keep the 10:50 elbows up. By squeezing hard even though you might be strong 10:56 enough to do a lot of weight you can still get a good feel 11:00 off that. Even body builders after they do their whole 11:05 routine are very tired just from contracting the muscles hard. 11:12 Okay, let's keep it going. Do 10 more. There's 1, reach out, 2, 11:24 and 3, 4, keep squeezing the biceps hard, each one, 5, 6, 7, 11:37 3 more, and 8, 9, one more time and 10. Good. Okay, what we're 11:45 going to do now is just put the hands together like that. We're 11:52 just going to stretch that out a little bit. Good job. 11:55 Feel that stretch. Okay good. Okay relax. We're going to get 12:05 back down in push up position. Smile Jim. And what we're going 12:12 kick into a triangular type position here and let's just do 12:16 these off the knees since I'm sure you're a little tired 12:21 already and lower yourself down and push up. Now what this does 12:25 is put the emphasis on the triceps area so once again if 12:28 you want to do this at home that's fine, just go against the 12:32 the wall. Put your hands like a triangle, lower yourself down, 12:35 push yourself back out. Simple as that. For those who are 12:40 really advanced you would do this just in a regular push up 12:46 position. I'm having both of them do a modified ladies' type 12:50 push up simply because this is a very difficult exercise and I 12:54 know that they're already a little bit tired from doing the 13:03 pushups earlier in the program. Okay, let's do 5 more. Okay a 13:11 couple more. One more. All right good job. Okay go ahead and 13:16 stand up and let's just kind of shake the arms out a little 13:21 bit. Those are easy, right? You're getting a good pump 13:24 already. Okay what we want to do now is get in a squat position 13:27 Remember when we do our squats we don't want to push our knees 13:30 over the feet, we want to sit back into the squat. So when 13:34 we are fairly strong sometimes we need a little extra 13:36 resistance so I want you guys to step up just a little bit. Okay. 13:39 Now I'm going to stay behind Miles here and we're going to 13:42 cross your arms across the chest and we're going to start 13:44 squatting down. I'm going to help Miles by giving him a 13:48 little extra resistance here. Okay, start squatting down. 13:52 Okay, sit back into it. Okay, now up slowly. Now back down. 13:56 All I'm doing with Miles is I'm just pushing down on the back of 14:01 his hips a little bit. Back down again and up slow. Now back down 14:08 and up and down. Good. Remember we want to keep the chest up 14:15 and stick the hips out. You can also do this by just holding 14:21 onto some dumbbells. Down slow. Good. Let's go down a little bit 14:29 deeper. Good. Back down and down. This is probably the best 14:35 overall exercise metabolically for the body because it takes 14:40 up so much muscle energy while you're doing it. Whenever you do 14:44 your exercise you want to make sure you keep your abdominals 14:48 in a nice tight position and that also will help to stimulate 14:51 the abdominal action. Okay, we're going to do 5 more. 15:00 And 3 more. Good. And last one. Down and hold. We're going to 15:11 hold for 20 seconds. There's 5. There's 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 15:22 16, 17, 18, 19 and 20. Good. Okay, whenever we do that we 15:29 want to stretch. Now these guys won't have a wall to hold onto 15:32 so I'm going to let them use me as the wall. So go ahead and put 15:36 an arm on me and go ahead and grab your leg and go ahead and 15:40 stretch. Once again we want to hold for about a 10-15 second 15:54 time period. Okay. Switch it around. Okay good. Now we're 16:07 going to go ahead and do some hamstring stretches. We're going 16:15 step out, up on the heel. Lean forward into it. Okay, now let's 16:27 switch it over. Feel it stretch in that hamstring area. Okay. 16:34 Let's go ahead and relax for a moment. Now let's start into our 16:42 abdominal training. What I'd like you fellows to do is go 16:44 ahead and lie down on your backs here. One of the most important 16:50 things we want to remember whenever we do abdominal 16:53 training is we want to draw the abdomen in as we do it. If you 16:57 push out you're going to simply encourage your abdominal wall 17:01 to stick out. Often times in gyms and in health clubs I see 17:05 people with the largest abdominals want to grab the 17:07 heaviest weights and do their abdominal crunches and what 17:10 they're doing is their causing themselves to expand out. 17:13 Any NFL football player lineman will usually have a very large 17:16 abdominal wall and the reason why is they have to spend so 17:20 much time fighting off other people that weigh 300 pounds. 17:23 They'd have to develop that large abdominal wall. That's 17:25 why body builders who have tried to play football have had 17:28 difficulty. They just don't have that type of development 17:31 through the abdominal girth. So we don't want to have a large 17:33 abdominal wall. We want to concentrate on focusing on 17:36 drawing in and that's the key component to our abdominal 17:39 training. First and foremost we want to put our hands behind our 17:43 neck. If you put your hands behind your head you could 17:46 possibly pull on your head and injure the cervical vertebrae. 17:49 Another thing you can do is you can just let your hands rest on 17:52 your thighs and let them slide up or you can put them on the 17:55 ground and let them slide forward. However, when we have 17:57 our hands behind our neck then we can offer ourselves stability 18:02 in the neck area as we start to sit up. Now, the old sit-ups 18:05 from the past are not healthy to do. In fact, they don't even 18:09 work the abdominal muscles per se. We have to remember the 18:12 abdominal muscle simply goes from the sternum area down into 18:16 the upper pelvis and simply goes like this. It has a 4 inch range 18:19 of motion. It does not cross a joint so any leg raises or 18:22 anything we do in that regard are not direct abdominal 18:26 stimulants. Abdominal muscles are for stability so any 18:29 exercise we do as we hold our proper posture is going to be 18:33 working the abdominal region. But now we're going to put some 18:36 emphasis on that. So with the hands behind the neck I want 18:39 you just simply to crunch up and we're going to try and do 20 of 18:43 those. We're going to do up and down at a nice rhythmic pace. 18:47 Okay keep it going one right after the other. Up and down, 18:53 and up and down. Good, keep it going. As you come up ideally 18:57 we want to try and lift our chin up so it's heading towards the 19:01 ceiling. Blow out as you come up on each one. Now we can do these 19:05 much slower as well, but what we're trying to do now is get 19:07 some repetition. Don't worry about going slow now though 19:09 Miles. Let's just go ahead and keep doing the range that we're 19:13 doing, just one after another. And then we're going to do some 19:17 modified positions of this abdominal training and we're 19:20 going to finish it with a static hold. Okay, I think that's about 19:25 enough. Now I want you to bring your feet off the ground. Keep 19:29 your knees bent, cross your ankles and we're going to keep 19:33 crunching up. Okay, let's do 20 more. I remember a person that 19:36 used to work out at our club. We used to call him Old Goofy 19:41 Bob. He lost over 100 pounds by walking 6-12 miles a day but he 19:45 smoked cigarettes the whole time he was doing it. And Bob, 19:48 although he lost a lot of weight still had an abdominal wall he 19:51 didn't like. He came in to me one time and he goes, Hey how 19:54 do I get rid of this. And he was all bent over. And I simply said 19:58 stand up straight Bob. And so he stood up and he goes, Oh wow 20:01 it's gone. Well awhile later he came up to me again, same 20:04 position, all bent over, sticking his abdominal wall out 20:07 and he said, Hey I still can't get rid of this. I said, Stand 20:11 up Bob. Oh yeah. And up he went. Away went the abdominal wall 20:14 again. So good posture will help that as well. Now let's put the 20:19 legs straight up. Okay and let's crunch some more. The other 20:24 thing we want to remember is the abdominal area is the place 20:28 where men put fat on first and the first place you put fat on 20:33 is the last place you're going to lose it. So we can think of 20:37 all these magical exercises we might try and do but you can't 20:40 contract fat. You're not going to take somebody who's very 20:43 obese and all of a sudden have his abdominal wall look like 20:46 Sylvester Stallone while the rest of him still looks very fat 20:49 and obese. We lose fat in the opposite order we put it on. 20:52 Often times when men push me and they say what do I do about 20:55 this abdominal wall and if you have them pull their shirt up 20:58 out comes their belly and you'll say flex that. And they try 21:02 really hard and everything starts to jiggle and you grab 21:05 a hold of it and say well come on flex it and they say well I 21:07 can't. Well, that's right, you cannot contract fat; it's 21:10 impossible. Okay, go ahead and relax for a moment fellows. 21:14 Now what we're going to do is in the same position we're going 21:17 bring a knee to the opposite elbow. So go ahead and put your 21:21 hands behind you neck again. Okay, both hands behind the 21:24 neck. Okay, now as you crunch up you're going to bring the knee 21:28 up Okay, bring it back down. Okay keep both feet off the 21:35 floor okay, and alternate. Okay, there you go. Good. Good. Go 21:39 ahead and move your knee a little bit more too. You can 21:45 draw that into you. Good. Good. Now what this is doing is it's 21:50 also working the intercostal area and the external oblique 21:54 area because we're putting just a little bit of twist in there. 21:57 We're still keeping the pelvis fairly stable because if we 22:01 don't then there's a possibility that we could injure the lower 22:04 back and we don't want to do that. Abdominal training is one 22:07 of the best ways to keep your lower back strong. In fact, the 22:10 old adage if you want to have a strong lower back get your belly 22:13 button closer to your backbone and that will help you to have a 22:16 stronger lower back. Once again as we do these exercises we want 22:22 to make sure we exhale. Okay, we're looking good. Let's go a 22:33 few more, let's do 10 more. There's 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 22:39 9, 10. Okay now I want you to come up in a crunch, legs off the ground and just 22:45 hold it there. We're just going to do a static contraction there 22:50 Hold it, hold it, hold it. Now to add a little variety put your 22:55 legs out straight, push them out straight this way. Okay now draw 23:02 them back in and push them back out and draw them back in. Okay 23:09 push out. Now just hold it there. Hold it, hold it, hold it 23:17 keep holding it. Okay 10 more seconds, 1,2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 23:26 9 and 10. Good job. Okay over on your abdomen. What we want to 23:32 do now is you just want to keep your pelvis down. You just want 23:38 to push up and stretch the abdominal wall there. Good, just 23:46 feel that stretch. Okay. Lay on your abdomen still. Put your 23:53 hands behind your back. Okay let's lift the chest up off the 23:59 floor. Okay and back down, the up, then down. Let's do 20 of 24:03 those. Once again whenever we train a muscle we want train the 24:07 antagonistic muscle so the antagonistic muscle to the 24:10 abdominal is the low back. Once again if they're both strong you 24:16 will have more stability of that back area. Okay. Let's go 10 24:28 more; 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. Okay now, up on your hands 24:36 and knees. What I want you to do is I want you to act like you're 24:44 a cat that just saw a dog. I want you to act like you going 24:47 arch your back and hiss at that dog. You don't have to hiss okay 24:50 Okay try and push that lower back up and just feel that 24:54 stretch. Good, good. Okay feel the stretch in your lower back 25:03 area. Okay good job. Okay let's go up on the feet. Now what 25:09 we're going to do is we're going to do some twisting. So we're 25:15 we're just simply going to turn to the side and then back and 25:24 then back. Good, keep going. Okay, we're going to do 10 more. 25:34 There's 1, 2, remember we don't want to do the side bend. Side 25:43 bends can actually cause problems with the back and also 25:47 it stimulates the development of the external oblique muscles. 25:57 Okay, we're down to 5 more. There's 1 and 2 and 3, 4 and 5. 26:03 Good. Now Miles I'd like you to lie on your back for just a 26:09 moment. I'd like to show you one more modification of this. Put 26:14 your arms out straight. Okay put your legs out straight. 26:17 Just go ahead and put them down. Okay I'd like you to bring your 26:20 right foot up and touch your left hand. Okay bring it over 26:24 to the side. Keep your left hand down. Okay bring it all the way 26:27 over. There you go. Okay and back. Now go the other side. 26:33 This is more of an advanced move that you want to do slowly. Okay 26:37 back. Okay, right leg again. Okay and back and left leg. 26:45 Okay good, good. Okay that should be good. Thanks a lot 26:53 fellows. Whenever we do abdominal training we want to 27:01 make sure we take it gradually, take it one step at a time and 27:05 also we always want to remember even if we did 100 crunches a 27:09 day or 1000 crunches a day or did abdominal work for an hour 27:12 straight, if we still have an abdominal wall that's covered 27:15 with fat, it's not going to make any difference. So the key to 27:20 having good healthy looking abdominal area is to get regular 27:23 exercise, have a proper diet and stop eating the foods that 27:27 are contributing to that fatty look of the abdominal wall. 27:31 Maybe we're talking about refined foods, concentrated 27:34 sugars, concentrated fats. All those things are what cause 27:37 people to start adding abdominal fat to the area. So as we 27:40 continue to train and have a regular workout routine, you're 27:43 going to see great progress. But above all else, train for the 27:47 glory of God. Through Christ you can have power to do all things. 27:51 God bless. |
Revised 2014-12-17