There Is A Method to the Madness
This is a podcast where I will be discussing all aspects of physical fitness. I am an exercise physiologist and personal trainer and owner of Maxwell's Fitness Programs for the last 25 years. My passion is health and fitness and I am excited to share my views, some stories, interviews and much more with you.
There Is A Method to the Madness
Abs: Kitchen-Made, Not Gym-Born
Welcome to there is a Method to the Madness. My name is Rob Maxwell and I'm an exercise physiologist and personal trainer. I am the owner of Maxwell's Fitness Programs and I've been in business since 1994. The purpose of this podcast is to get to the real deal of what really works and, most importantly, why things work. Hence the name there is a Method to the Madness. Before I get started today, let me thank Jonathan and Lynn Gilden of the Gilden Group Realty Pros. They are committed to providing the highest level of customer service in home sales. Why don't you give them a shout and figure out what your home is worth? 386-451-2412. Hello out there, fit fans. 886-451-2412. Hello out there, fit fans.
Speaker 1:This is Rob here and I'm picking up on some of my hard and fast commandments of the importance of following rules with our training. And I'm going to pick up on a biggie today, and that is abs are made in the kitchen. I know this is going to be a biggie because anytime I talk about diet or tonicity or anything like that, people want to hear it and I get it. I mean, it's just a big part of our culture right now. So I have a feeling all the downloads are going to be super high on this. I look at those things. It's just interesting to me.
Speaker 1:I always make it a habit to talk about the important things, no matter what people like to talk about the important things, no matter what people like. I hate to break it to people, because everybody needs to, I believe, learn the facts about health and fitness, because one of my goals is to get more people exercising. I'm going to continue to harp on the fact that only 28% of our country is exercising enough to get the benefits and I would love to see it increase and I'm trying to do my part in my small way to do so. So I like to give the facts out there to take away any of the reasons why people may not be working out, and that's why I have my lists and this is why I talk about the things that I do. But this is a win-win, because this one people love to hear. They love to hear about diet and tonicity and body composition, and it is a very important topic at the same time. The reason why it's important is because of the fact I believe a lot of people drop out of working out because of this, because they don't see the weight loss or the change in their body composition that they wanted to see.
Speaker 1:Now there is nothing wrong with training or exercising and or eating to have a better physique. I mean, that is a big part of this. There is nothing wrong with that in my estimation. Not that I sit up here and judge people's reasons for doing things, but I just want to make it very clear that there is nothing wrong with training for vanity if that is the only reason why you are training.
Speaker 1:Because my guest on the show said it the other day. He said it beautifully. He said when you look better, you feel better, and there is so much truth to that, and I believe what he meant by looks and I believe what I mean when I say looks is look best for you, like just feeling good about yourself because you're doing the best you can for yourself. Because I think everybody listening understands that there is not a perfect way to look. Everybody looks different and fitness looks so different on everybody.
Speaker 1:But one of the big things that comes up all the time is training the abdominals to flatten the stomach. Now, that is the myth of spot reduction, and that's true no matter what area we are talking about. True, no matter what area we are talking about. We could be talking about the abdominals, or we could be talking about, say, the thighs on some people. They'll say things like well, I really want to do this exercise because I want to make my abdominals or my thighs or whatever, smaller. Well, it just doesn't work that way, all right. So fat tissue and muscle tissue are two completely different tissues.
Speaker 1:Whenever we exercise a muscle, whether it be via crunches or sit-ups or abdominal machines for our abdominals, we are working the muscle and we are making the muscle stronger. To make the muscle stronger, it must hypertrophy, which means actually to get bigger. If we are exercising the thighs via squat or leg extension or leg curl, we are making the thighs stronger. If we are making the thighs stronger, we are making the thighs bigger via hypertrophy, because that is how muscles grow. So when we strength train, we are actually making the muscles a little bit bigger. Don't even get me started on how don't worry, you're not going to get too big. That's probably myth. Number two is that we think if we just start working out a little bit, we're going to like increase our muscle size so much we won't fit in our clothes anymore. That's not how it really works either. That, my friends, is a matter more of genetics, how we respond, so the way we show our muscles, so we have more definition.
Speaker 1:So when people, whether it be men or women and I think men and women are really equal on this one as far as the abdominal things, you know, both genders seem to really focus on that and again, there's nothing wrong with that. But they might say I want to have a six pack, I want my abdominals to show. When bodybuilders get up on stage or physique competitors get up on stage, they want their abdominals to show. Absolutely. I have done, what have I done? I guess I've done four bodybuilding shows in my life, one when I was way younger and a few in the last three or four years as a master's athlete. I mean, of course you want the abdominal muscles to show. That's a big part of a physique competition Now, to get them to show, no matter what level they're going to show at, whether they're going to be the six-pack abdominals or you're going to have a two-pack that you never had before, and those abdominals at the very top are starting to show whatever and again, please understand that I'm just using the abdominals as an example here. This could be any muscle group. But to get them to show it's all going to happen via the diet.
Speaker 1:So when those muscles have been strengthened underneath and, by the way, it doesn't take a lot. They're just like any other muscle tissue. It is so funny sometimes when you look back and you just see people's behaviors and you hear that they're doing a thousand crunches a day that make their abdominal muscles show up and it's like, well, do you really think your abdominal muscles are any different than your biceps or your quads? I mean, would you really do a thousand curls a day? Would you do a thousand squats a day? It's funny how people think that, like, some muscle tissue and parts of your body is very different from the other. Now we all have differences with where we have more slow twitch and fast twitch muscle fiber, but it is still muscle fibers. So the big myth again is that you can do those thousand crunches a day and you're going to make them show. But that is not it. It doesn't take a lot to get the muscles to strengthen of the abdominals, like any other region. Basically, the rule is quite simple If we stimulate any muscle group and get close to muscular failure, that's the point where you can't do another repetition. They're going to be stimulated enough to get stronger and hypertrophy, which means increase their tone. I mean whether it be 15 reps or 30, I mean it's the same thing, they are no different.
Speaker 1:One reason I don't want to get off the path here, but one reason people do like to do so many is one it is exercise. I mean, at least you're moving when you're doing abdominal work, for sure. But two, it's easy. I mean crunch work, floor work is so much easier than say squats, so abdominal work is quite easy compared to say squats. They're not a very large muscle group, so it's not overly hard. So people think, well, I can do this and do a lot of them.
Speaker 1:Again, you just may be wasting your time. If your goal is to flatten your stomach, if your goal is to strengthen your core which I absolutely agree we should be doing, then that's different. But again, it doesn't take nearly as much as some people will tell you that it does. So we strengthen the abdominals underneath and then we lose the body fat. And the best way to lose the body fat is to eat a little bit less than what we need. So create a caloric deficit. We will lose the body fat and then boom. If you have the abdominals underneath and you probably do if you're exercising and you have the genetics to be pretty darn lean for them to show, then they're going to show. And when I say that so, when you see a bodybuilder up on stage or a physique competitor women, men, doesn't matter and you're seeing those abdominals, the men can be as low as 4.8 to 5% body fat to show. The women are somewhere around 9 to 10 to 11% body fat to show those abdominals. That is really, really lean.
Speaker 1:By the way, not everybody can get that lean. There is a genetic component to this. And if you can't, who cares? I mean again, that's not necessarily the model of fitness for everybody. Everybody is a little bit different. Most people I know don't find that ultra, ultra attractive. Like there is a happy medium. To get that lean is largely genetic and also takes a huge commitment on your part to really drop that body fat to those kind of lower levels. Don't get me wrong. Genetics aside, everybody can get leaner, everybody can get leaner, but not everybody has that physique where those abdominal muscles are going to show.
Speaker 1:And there's also symmetry issues too. Like some people have different shaped torsos like they might have shorter torso, longer legs, longer legs, short, longer I'm sorry. Longer torso, shorter legs, and vice versa. So everybody has slightly different physiques with their symmetry. Some people are more blockier, meaning their hips are a little bit bigger, so that might also create sort of a different look for the abdominals.
Speaker 1:There have been professional bodybuilders who were kind of squatty. They didn't have that real symmetrical look of, say, an Arnold Schwarzenegger who had that pretty long torso and he had longer legs but he had that nice V taper that made his abdominal muscles come in and, believe it or not, his abdominal, his waist, wasn't that narrow but he had this huge appearance of a narrow waist because he had this very large back upper lats and his pectoral major were so big that it came in at this V taper and he was able to get lean. But he really didn't have a small waist. I mean, he was somewhere around 33, 34, which is not that small for a bodybuilder. So there's all these symmetrical issues too. So there's a lot of different things that go into this. But if you want those abdominals and really this is just sort of an analogy for everything If you want to have these nice toned muscles, you're going to have to change your diet.
Speaker 1:I mean, that's all there is to it. You can increase your fitness and not change your diet Absolutely. You can increase your endurance, you can get stronger, you can increase your muscular endurance, you can improve your VO2 max, you can feel better. All these things can happen, but the appearance factor is largely going to come from making alterations in your diet.
Speaker 1:I remember many years back I went and spoke to a friend of mine's church group. He had a group that he worked with at his church and he asked actually his wife asked, but he was an old friend, he and I went way back and ironically he was my partner when I was doing some bodybuilding in my younger days. He was my workout partner and he was out there and he was always a fit guy, real, genetically inclined to be that way. And I remember he raised his hand and he said you know, hey, rob. He says I remember you telling me back when we used to work out that like to really get that appearance, it was 80 percent diet and I was like so pleasantly surprised that he remembered that and I'm like, wow, you know, I don't know for sure Like we've always kind of thrown that number around, but I said yes, ultimately, ultimately that is very, very true Like we really have to change that diet and diet it is somewhere around 80% of it to get that look that we really, really want as physique athletes and that's going to be for everybody. And I can promise you the best physique athletes in the world that have these amazing midsections are not doing a lot of abdominals.
Speaker 1:I remember when he and I were training for our first show. You know we were young, we were scared, so we really wanted to do our best. You know, nobody wants to go out there in almost your underwear and show the world and not feel good Like it's a scary proposition, by the way. So we were doing everything we could to maximize our chances of not making fools of ourselves. So I promise you we were doing everything and everything right and we were working really hard, and I also promise you that the abdominal work was the least of our concerns. We did very little. At the end of our workouts we would do a little tiny circuit of a few leg raises when I say a few, probably 20 to 25, 20 to 25 crunches, 20 to 25 frog kicks, and we didn't even do it with maximal intensity. You know we just did it. Why? Because the abdominal muscles are already there, so we did not spend all this time doing all this abdominal work.
Speaker 1:It's so funny when, even to this day, like exercise science is out there in the regular part of the world now, like it's not just me reading my manuals and journals. I mean, it's out there. You know, people talk about it. Unfortunately, a lot of them don't understand it, but they talk about it. And there's still people out there selling the six minute abs and the 30 minute abdominal routines. And what are you doing? Like, if you really want to maximize somebody's time, like, let's say, somebody wants that look and they're going to a trainer, like they should be spending their time doing hard, compound movements like squats and presses and pulls and lunges, because that's going to burn the most calories and burn the most fat, and then they'll have the abdominals the most calories and burn the most fat, and then they'll have the abdominals. I promise you, if you didn't do an abdominal again and I'm not saying don't because some people need to people really need to work their core. There are people with very weak cores. But if you're not one of those people and you never trained your abdominals again, they would still show like it's not overly important, and it's not important at all if you're doing it for aesthetics. I promise you that.
Speaker 1:Now let me close with this. The downside to doing too much abdominal work is it does create a muscle imbalance. See people's posture change when all they do not all, but I'm assuming people do other exercises when they're doing their thousand crunches a day. But when you're doing that much work, so what the abdominal muscles do? The rectus abdominal muscles? They're the muscles that you use when you do crunches and your abdominal exercises they flex the spine. That means pull the spine forward. So if you have overactive abdominal muscles, you always have this little bit of a forward tilt and a lot of times people will actually have weaker low backs, which would lead to lower back injuries because they have a major imbalance between their abdominal muscles and their erector spinae. I would much rather see people focusing more on their erector spinae, the spinal erectors, because they're often neglected. Why? Vanity reasons, right, you don't see people go into the gym and go oh, I'm going to do a thousand lower backs today, I'm going to crush my lower back today.
Speaker 1:Thank you for listening to today's show. I ask you to please follow this show on wherever you get your podcasts and also please hit automatic downloads. It really helps me and it helps the show. Now I want to thank Overhead Door of Daytona Beach, the premier garage door company in Volusia County With the best product with the best service. I can vouch for Jeff and Zach Hawk, the owners. They are great people. If you need any help with your garage doors, give them a shout 386-222-3165.
