You like burn? Light a match.
—Dr. Fred “Squat” Hatfield
You tried high reps. You went for the “burn.” It did not work. Why do you insist on doing the same thing and expect a different outcome?
The “burn” you feel from high reps is from acid buildup and does absolutely nothing for toning your muscles. I remember picking up a copy of The Guinness Book of World Records and seeing a picture of the gent who held the record for the number of consecutive sit-ups—many, many thousands. This martyr must have “felt the burn” more than anyone else on this planet, yet he did not even have a six-pack to show for it, even with low body fat.
To know why high reps have failed this trainee and many others, one must understand what makes abs hard and strong. It is a combination of increased resting tension and “real” muscle growth.
Muscle tone is simply residual tension in a relaxed muscle.
Tension is the means by which a muscle generates force. The more tiny strands of contractile proteins hook on to each other, the more tension and effort the muscle produces, the more tone it has at rest. Contrary to popular belief, a resting muscle is not totally relaxed—your body would have collapsed into a bag of bones if it were—but partially tensed, preloaded to spring into action.
The English words “tone” and “tune” were derived from the same Old French word: ton. Muscle tone has been poetically likened to the tautness of a guitar string. Think of “toned” muscles as “tuned for action.”
Of course, one must differentiate between tight muscles and toned muscles. The former are short and stiff, the latter long and vibrant, ready to go off like a stretched bow.
Muscles get short when they don’t get enough opportunity to be long. One scenario is inactivity and bad posture. When a person spends a lot of time sitting, his abs shorten. Because he is lazy, they also weaken. As they get weaker, they get tighter.
In another scenario, the individual does strength train but only through a short range of motion; consider the permanently bent arms of a bodybuilder.
In a third scenario, muscles exhausted by high reps go into a protective spasm. They get hard temporarily, but they are athletically worthless.
The key to tuning your six-pack for action—while making it strong and hard—is to train with high tension.
It should be apparent that one cannot maintain high levels of tension for a long period of time. Over decades of experience, strength coaches have determined that five reps are about all one can do, and fewer are just fine.
Eugene Sandow, an iron legend equally famous for his strength and his physique, limited the reps in abdominal exercises to three! Not surprisingly, he picked hard moves, e.g., the straight arm, straight leg sit-up with dumbbells held overhead.
In addition to “tuning” your muscles, heavy low rep work will build parts of them that make them strong and dense.
There are two types of muscular hypertrophy: sarcoplasmic and myofibrillar.
The first blows the muscle up with glycogen and other things needed to endure high reps. One molecule of glycogen binds three molecules of water. Now you know what bodybuilders’ bloated bi’s are made of.
The second, spurred by heavy resistance, increases the size of the fibers’ contractile apparatus or myofibrils—the “real” muscle of a lifter or a gymnast.
“Which type of hypertrophy is going to develop depends on the nature of training,” explains Prof. Evgeniy Ilyin. “Prolonged dynamic efforts with a small resistance lead to the first type of hypertrophy; large muscle tensions in isometric regime—to the hypertrophy of the second type.”
What is fascinating about myofibrillar hypertrophy from the standpoint of looking good is, “the muscle’s cross section may change insignificantly, as what mostly changes is the myofibril packing density in the muscle fiber.” In other words, heavy weights make muscles dense and hard but not really big. Doesn’t this sound like the abs you are after?
Some will argue: “Why would I train the abs with low reps? These are slow twitch muscles!”
This may or may not be true, as the research is inconsistent.
Besides, your abbies’ fiber composition is irrelevant. If your goals are strength and muscle definition, you should go after your fast twitchers, whatever their percentage may be. Here is a fascinating gold nugget of research that has somehow escaped the eyes of bodybuilders for over four decades: faster muscle fibers congregate near the surface of the muscle and slower ones hide deep inside. Which could explain why lean strength athletes—powerlifters, weightlifters, gymnasts, etc.—display remarkably dense muscles and “high reppers” tend to stay soft.
Bulgarian gymnastics coach Ivan Ivanov likes to say that low rep, heavy training “shrinks” muscles, while bodybuilding style pump-up “blows them up.”
Acquiring a killer six-pack becomes ridiculously simple and easy once you understand that you need to train your midsection for strength and not endurance.
Onto the exercise selection.
There are many effective moves. The kettlebell get-up is one of the great ones. Its benefits and applications could fill a book. Relevant to today’s topic, it is an ab killer.
Dr. Bret Contreras tested 52 exercises and he stated: “The TGU was the only exercise…that had over 100% peak activation in all four core muscles that were tested. Good job, kettlebellers!”
(A 100% activation takes place during a maximal voluntary isometric contraction, when you purposefully tense the muscles as hard as possible. It is possible to exceed the 100% under some conditions.)
The scientist got these surprisingly high readings, and it only took a fifty-pounder:
It must be noted that while the peak activation of each midsection muscle is very high, the mean activation is modest, in the 30-40% range. No muscle fires this hard for a long time as the girevik keeps changing the direction of loading. No problem, just punch in more total reps to give each midsection muscle more time under high tension. And up the weight; for men, a 24kg kettlebell get-up is only the beginning and many women can go beyond.
Now all you have to do to get your new six-pack to show is lose the spare tire.
Whatever your training question is, S&S is often the answer.