 In this episode of Mime Pump, we talk all about training your abs and your core, and using minimal equipment. So we talk all about the factors that contribute to a very effective core workout, like how do you get these muscles to develop so that they're more visible, how do you make them more aesthetic, what rep ranges you should train in, like how frequent you should train. We talk about a lot of the common pitfalls and mistakes. We talk about some of our favorite, favorite exercises. We think you're going to love this episode, especially if you really want to place a special focus on developing the muscles of your midsection. Now before the episode starts, I want to let you know that we do have a core training program. It's actually one of the original programs that we ever sold at Mime Pump. In fact, if you enroll in the program, you get to see 2014 sal versions. This is an old program I created, still extremely effective. It was actually filmed in my old personal training studio. This is before Mime Pump ever became a thing. And because right now everybody's stuck at home and because we're doing this episode, we're going to put this program at 50% off. That means it only costs, it's a full workout program for the core. That only makes this program $28.50. Here's how you get that program. Go to nobs6pack.com, so that's N-O-B-S, the number six, P-A-C-K dot com, and then use the code nobs50 for the half off. So that's N-O-B-S, and the number five zero no space for that discount. You know, speaking of feeding Sal's ego. Oh, I like this. Yeah, I know. It's going on here. Just pumping your tires. Do we need to do that? I know. We don't actually. I think we should talk about this because, one, I forget a lot of times. We feel like we talk about something at nauseam sometimes, and then what I catch us doing is after we've talked about it so much, we are, okay, we move away from it, then we don't discuss it. Kind of forget. Yeah, and kind of forget about it, how important it is. And I was reminded of this, and I actually wanted to actually open it up with Sal kind of sharing a little bit of the origin story of it. And I was getting, I've been getting obviously lots of messages about people that are at home and things to do, and you know, one of the people that messaged me just literally yesterday was asking about, hey, do you know any like really good ad programs? And I got a loud, I was like, oh, shit, I was like, you know, when we first started the podcast, we talked so much about this, and a lot of that is, one, at that time we only had anabolic and no BS six pack abs, and I thought that, okay, we talked so much about it, I think we've beaten that, that dead horse. But the reality is, we haven't visited the kind of ab conversation in a long time. And I thought, you know, what, what, what, when, when will we have a better time to discuss an at home program that doesn't really require much weights at all to perform? And I want to start off first, though, before we get into it is actually you sharing Sal because the, the kind of the origin story of no BS six pack abs is really cool. And it was also around the time you and I were first kind of meeting and talking. And I remember looking into this, this was also, you know, I looked at anabolic and I looked at no BS six pack abs. And this was part of the, the brilliance of, of again, pumping your tires of, of you and what made me, it is what sold me, it really did. It's what sold me on, okay, I've got to meet this guy and we got to talk because he definitely, he definitely gets it on another level that most people don't. And, and so you have to share with the audience when, when, how you created, why you created it. And then let's, let's break down some of the philosophies behind it. Yeah. I mean, there, there, I mean, you guys know this just as well as I do. We've all been doing this a long time that there's a lot of, of myth and what would be considered common knowledge in the fitness space that surrounds muscle building and training and fat loss and some of this stuff. When you get into the space, you become a trainer, you figure out, oh, this is totally false. Some of it lingers for a very, very long time. Some of it is so pervasive that you accept it as truth until later on, maybe sometimes years later, actually took me 10 years to figure out a lot of the stuff that I thought was true about ab training was totally false. So up until this point, some of the stuff that I had thought was, you know, the way you trained abs was, you know, with really high reps and really, you know, it's about getting lean. And if you get lean enough, everybody has a six pack. There's definitely some truth to this is what makes a lot of this common knowledge, kind of myth stuff so hard to, to, to see through is that it's kind of based in some truth. Right. And that's true. Every single person has a six pack. If you peel off every layer of body fat, there's definitely, that's the shape of the abs. It looks like there's six blocks or eight blocks or four, depending on your genetics, but there's definitely muscles there. If you were to peel the body fat back. And so I'd been training for, you know, a long time, you know, everybody knows the story, right? I started working out at 14, became a pro, a professional trainer at 18. And, you know, having a midsection that was impressive was always something that was something that I was after, mainly because it was something that people valued like, if you're at the beach, or you take your shirt off, if you want to really look impressive, one of the most impressive thing, one of the things that anybody will look at and admire is a well-defined, you know, strong looking midsection. Well, you remember that stat that you brought up not that long ago that I thought was hilarious that I'd never heard before that there are, there's more millionaires in the world than there are people that have six pack abs. True. I think that's hilarious. It is crazy. It actually highlights how hard it is to get to this. Right. Because obviously it's not easy to become a millionaire. Right. And again, if you're, you know, if the average person is looking at you, let's say you're at the beach and you're a guy and you take your shirt off, you know, someone who trains might look at you and be like, wow, I could see he's got really developed delts and look at his back and his chest and all that stuff. But the average, average person, they look at your midsection. If you have a six pack, you're fit. Like it's the most impressive thing. The gold standard. It is. It's interesting that we've strayed away from, you know, ab conversations as much because that's the most high search term that you could possibly, you know, search in regard to fitness because that, that tends to just be this, it's like a benchmark. So the epitome of when I got fit was when I had a six pack. Oh, what people think totally. And so at the time, you know, I thought, oh, I just got to get shredded enough and do all these high reps and maybe don't train my core that much because I'm deadlifting and squatting. And so up into this point in order for me to get like a visible six pack, I personally, and this is a little different from person to person, but I had to get like eight to seven percent body fat. Now most guys, they say we'll have a six pack at around 10%. I had to get down to about seven, eight percent. And they weren't really visible when I was relaxed. And I really admired when, when dudes would have abs that you could just see all the time. They didn't have to flex them. They could just walk around. And they had like these brick abs that would kind of stick through. So I was always searching for that. Well, anyway, as I got deeper and deeper into personal training, and as I started to study workout techniques of, you know, the old time bodybuilders and strength athletes, like way before, anabolic steroids were ever a big thing. And by the way, if you examine the workout routines of bodybuilders and strength athletes, you can clearly see the influence of anabolic steroids. Clearly the training routines totally changed. Body part split routines were not popular until anabolic steroids became a big thing. Before that, everybody trained kind of full body focused on compound movements and all that stuff. So you could clearly see that. So I was studying these kind of old routines. And I started to kind of think to myself and say, you know, why, why are we told to train the abs differently than any other muscle? Like, do they not build? Don't they build like the biceps or the delts or anything else? And then I also started to really look at the function of the muscles of the midsection. And what's true for any muscle is this, if you train a muscle through a full range of motion through it's what it's supposed to do, you're going to get better results than if you train it in a partial range of motion, and you'll get better results than if you train it in just a static tension range of motion. Now all of those produce some kind of result, by the way, but the one that builds the most muscle and produces the best results is always kind of that full range of motion. So then what I started to do is I started to train and experiment with myself. And then I started to experience certain changes. I was focusing on really full ranges of motion. I started using resistance. I started thinking of working my core the same way I thought of working my shoulders or my back or my chest or my arms. I thought to myself, why didn't I build these muscles? Because I know it's true for the legs and arms and chest and back, which is this, if you have more muscle, you don't have to look as lean to see the same definition. You just don't. If you have a muscular, you know, muscular biceps and triceps, your arms look leaner at higher body fat percentages. This is totally true. The same thing should be true for the midsection. And so I went on this, this, this I embarked on this journey of building the muscles of my core. And then this is how I developed the program, the no BS six pack formula. Now my abs used to be a body part where again, you couldn't see them until I was seven or 8% body fat. I got them built to the point where at 10% body fat, not only could you see them when I flex them, you could see them when they were relaxed, you could even see them through my shirt. If I had a tight shirt on, people would comment on my abs. And it was, it was a massive complete transformation. And that's when I came up with the program, the no BS six pack formula. Now, when you talk about full range of motion, though, you also have to explain to people the function of it. Because I think that's, that's where a lot of my clients struggled was really understanding the function of the abs and how to because if you don't understand the function, it's hard to understand how to take that through full range of motion. It's not as simple as, you know, oh, when I squat, I take my legs by going all the way down, I take it through full range of motion. It's so much easier for people to visually see that or a bicep curl going all the way open to all the way close. The abs are a little more complex. And so I think you got to explain first to people like, really, the complete function of the abs and then also maybe the mistakes that people make when they do which muscles tend to get in the way of that. Oh, totally. I think people, the average person thinks if you fold your body, that that's abs, right? So if I, if I'm laying on the floor and I sit up, or if I bring my legs closer to my body, that I am working my abs through a full range of motion. That's not necessarily true. Now all muscles when they contract, they bring both attachment points closer together. So think of like a rubber band attached at two points. If that rubber band shrinks, it just pulls the two points closer together. Well, the attachment points of the abs, for example, really are the pelvis and the lower rib cage. So think of your pelvis, think of your lower rib cage. When the abs contract, they bring those two parts closer together, not your legs to your body or your upper body down to your legs. That's part of it. And so what ends up, and now what does that? Hip flexors. Right. And you got to explain to that, okay, if the hip flexors are what responsible to that, what do we know about most people? Oh, tight and strong hip flexors. Right. Because we sit all day long, right? That's it. And we walk, we at least walk, which is a lot of hip flexor, you know, activation. And remember, the hip flexors, so here's what's interesting, by the way, is so if this is you, this is exactly what's happening. If you find that your lower back starts to get tight, and you start to feel pain whenever you work your abs, that's because you are hammering your hip flexors. The hip flexors, one muscle in particular, the psoas muscle attaches at the thigh, goes through the body, and then attaches at the lower part of the spine. So when you're doing leg raises or sit ups, and you're not really working the abs through a full range of motion, what you're going to feel it is in the hip flexor. And oftentimes, it's not in the hip that you'll feel it. It's at the attachment, which is the lower back. So you start to get like, oh, I can't do how many times you have your clients say this, I can't do leg raises when I do hurts my lower back. Right. That's not because your back is bad. It's because your hip flexors are doing all the work in your midsection, your core, your abs in particular are not. So what's the full range of motion for the abs? Full range of motion for the abs is lumbar flexion and extension. So it's bending at the lower back, not at the hips. So imagine a waiter, like an old school waiter, bending forward with a really, really straight back to bow. Right. That's it. That's hip. That's your hips. That's hip hinging. Hinging. Right. Now imagine somebody, imagine you're laying on the floor and pretend like you're a piece of paper rolling. I love to use the term rolling up. Like I think that's where that's why I don't like sit up. Sit up is too, too simple. And I think that's where people go wrong as they think about sitting their body weight up and you just do whatever you think momentum like I'm trying to propel my upper body forward when in fact I'm trying to actually like roll forward and get my sternum close to my belly button. This is why I liked the perfect setup so much and teaching that because you're really trying to teach a client to understand how to you're you can roll your vertebrae because you can roll the vertebrae like you say and we've twisted up with a paper and if you kind of think of that visually of what you're trying to do versus just trying to get the body up it makes a world of a difference just thinking of it like that. Oh it's huge and how hard is it? You take somebody I've done this so many times. I'll take a client and I'll say oh do you work your core? Oh yeah that's what I work all the time. I can do you know 50 you know 50 sit ups or 50 sit ups on a physio ball. Okay. I can hold a plank for like five minutes. Yeah and I'll say okay well let's try let's try doing them but I'm gonna watch your form and then I'll change their form and have them focus on rolling up and they go from doing 50 to doing five because now there because here's what happens when you do a sit up or a leg raise with all hip flexors you'll feel it's in your abs too because your abs are stabilizing so they are stabilizing but you're not working them through a full range of motion the muscles you're working through a full range of motion are your hip flexors. The worst exercise for this by the way leg raises leg raises almost nobody does them right nobody when you watch someone do leg raises all they're doing is bringing their knees up swinging their legs out yeah and and really what you should do if you want to do a proper leg raise and I teach this in that in that program is you do bring the legs up but you curl yeah you curl the hips under your body it's like you're touching your tailbone take your tailbone up so you still kind of propel yourself up with the glutes kind of squeezing super hard but written it's a high resistance exercise but it really builds the abs only when you do them properly when you do them wrong you're just going to get super tight well this is why to I think you I think it's important that you learn how to do a just a laying flat on the ground really good reverse crunch yes before you progress to a like a you got to learn the technique first yeah if you have to first I mean we talk about this all time we just you know came off of a month of talking a lot about mobility and the neurological connection that's part of this problem here is that you have a really poor connection to your abdominals especially that that first initial roll up and so getting you people to understand that it's more of that it's less of a you know do you have abs or not have are you really connected well and understand how to articulate the movement learning to practice that and get really connected to it before you start to progress all these other members remember you guys remember years ago when I did that post on how to do a plank so that works your abs yeah everybody lost their minds oh yeah all physical therapists lost their mind everybody because when you do a plank you see this kind of straight back or maybe slow small arch in the low back and that's fine you're using some core using a lot of hip flexors but if you do a plank and you tuck your tailbone like you drop your tailbone squeeze your core like you're doing a crunch now hold that totally different exercise there's no way you can't feel your abs no that's what you're doing you're squeezing your abs and supporting yourself with your I remember when I learned that I never again taught a standard plank yep because I realized how where's the nine nine and ten times you're working with people up to hip flexor probably one hundred percent yeah yeah the other issue that I that I think comes up with with core training is and this is a kind of a trend that I think is silly which is not really training the obliques you know everybody wants to work the abs right nobody wants to train the obliques I think that's such a big mistake yeah I mean come on like and I know this is probably influenced a lot by like presenting yourself on stage and there's this sort of value of having this this uh you know this tiny waist and so like building building the obliques to a lot of people seems like it's going to make them look a little more square but in fact it really helps to kind of highlight the development of the entire core well it's it's kind of ironic that people don't when if you ask somebody would you like layman's term explained to me like if I asked like Katrina like what's your favorite part about when my abs are ripped we know I'm asking what do they say they say oh that v yeah it's that v well what creates that v and exaggerates that v more than anything else is pronounced obliques totally yep so one of the best things that you can do to develop that look or create that illusion of having an even deeper v or more pronounced abs is also by developing the obliques now there's you know crossfit is brought a few things to the fitness space and some of them good some of them bad here's one thing that I think is good it's actually highlighted what functional good core muscles look like because when you see these crossfit athletes that are shredded and lots of people women will say oh my god I want a midsection like that crossfit athlete or I want my midsection look like that dude that won the games look at their cores their cores are built for competition and what you'll find is amazing abs but also well developed obliques it looks because they have to support their spine because all the load they're throwing yes looks amazing and and to that I mean I know we're we're kind of talking a lot about the aesthetics right because I know that's what appeals to most people but the truth is as trainers we know the the function of that and the importance of that especially I mean I was just talking to a client of mine and you know she went in and saw her chiropractor and having SI joint issues and she was power washing for like four hours and that in the chiropractors explaining to her just like oh you have weak rotational strength and I told her I said listen this is the stuff I said this is why you pay me the big bucks I said I know you normally come to me and you're asking stuff about nutrition and looking a certain way but when I get feedback from you like that then I can give you exercises and movements to help support that I mean that's in that's incredible information for me and a really good coach hears that and goes oh wow now what I'll do and what I'll do in your workout today is incorporate some anti-rotational type movements or rotational type exercises or oblique specific stuff which is going to help support that and I would have to say that if I think of a lot of things that you know clients lack in as they age it would be that rotational strength and stability I'll say this right now the oblique all muscles are important on your body but the obliques are some of the most important for this reason right here okay most people even out of shape people even people who don't work out they at the very least walk I mean I don't even mean walking for working out they just have to walk right you walk from one place to another okay try this right now if you're listening to this podcast and you have headphones on try walking but when your right leg goes up moves forward move your right arm with that right leg and when your left leg moves forward move your left your left arm with it so rather than countering because typically what happens if I step with my right my left arm moves forward and same thing with my left I walk like a robot you see how fast you can walk see if you can run that way it's terrible you have zero control you have no speed it's you can't walk that way you have this rotation that's natural in humans which we are you know the only animal we know of that walks on two legs this is part of why we're able to do that is we have that counter rotation with the upper body it's what prevents us from its local motion it prevents us from spinning in place when we're trying to run and move and that's a bleak also you just reminded me some too holy is for my athletes that are listening right now this is a way I can always tell if you're a good performance coach take a look at like max marzo uh j um um cori slesinger yeah cori slesinger um and then all uh paul fabrics right pj pjf performance right if you look and literally I was just on all their pages this last week they're always popping up in my feed because I love their content they all are athletic trainers right at the professional highest level and look at the movements they're always teaching they're always incorporating incorporating that rotational power and strength because of how it translates to athletes so if you're an athlete listening to this and maybe you care maybe less about the benefits of looking like you have great abs boy the functional carry over into being performing and being a better athlete and I can't think right now of a sport that doesn't need that all sport you gotta support your spine in multiple directions you know like life isn't just in front of us and behind us so you gotta start thinking outside of that how can I support my body how could I train my body uh to be able to withstand a lot of these forces pulling me left to right uh when I twist you know do I have the strength to be able to support my body in that twist it is and it's it is what allows you to utilize the strength of your limbs if you have weak obliques your legs and your arms cannot express their full capacity even if you do nothing but walk even if you just walk like I just highlighted earlier you have to have functional obliques and from an aesthetic standpoint okay if you develop one nice looking obliques with nice abs even if your waist doesn't shrink even if you have the same size waist the illusion is going to look like you have a tighter more amazing looking midsection so do not neglect the obliques and I know most programs don't look at the look at the play the obliques are like second fiddle they're not as important you just reminded me something else too and I don't know how often you guys got this I remember getting this a lot I had many clients that the limiting factor of us getting a stronger deadlift and squat was due to having very a weak core weak obliques oh my god all the time and I there was many times where I'd have a client who would hit a plateau in those two things and we just maybe weren't putting a lot of emphasis on on ab training at that time and I could see that I could see that they were weak and stabilizing and supporting themselves as I was starting to increase load so then I went back to the drawing board incorporate a lot more training core naps all of a sudden we see squat and deadlift oh yeah just think about that I mean if if you're pulling something up from the ground uh from from your left arm from your right arm you're never going to have like perfectly even force distributed between my left and right side so the that limiting factor being your if you have a weak obliques that's that's there to stabilize you so you can stay rigid you could stay strong you could stay efficient as you're pulling that up so if you're not training that you know immediately that's a performance loss oh yeah anytime you do a press with dumbbells or a standing exercise or a row with one arm or two arms basically anytime you do anything involving your body you need to have a strong and stable core the another big problem and mistake that I saw uh and I still see this is this weird myth that somehow the way you train the core is with really really high reps like you only ever do high reps all those infomercials yeah and it's terrible and this this really boils down to the myth that you know high reps sculpts and shapes and tones and low reps builds lots of bulk and size and of course who would like a big bulky midsection nobody right everybody wants a sculpted tight midsection so I'm not going to do any high reps like here's a news flash okay resistance training the goal is always to build muscle always now that doesn't mean you're gonna get this massive midsection and by the way if you had let's just say you were the one in a trillion people that could develop muscle like uh Mr. Olympia you still would not do a hard heavy ab workout wake up the next day and be like oh no I messed up my midsection grew too much it still doesn't happen that fast the fastest way to get your midsection to look a particular way is to build those muscles and high reps can build muscle just like low reps can but if you only ever do high reps it loses its value this is one of my favorite to talk about because you know I love sharing paradigm shattering moments in our careers and this was an area that I I felt victim to I mean I was the trainer who abs was kind of an afterthought it was at the end of the workout it's like how we finish something off and you'd be doing you know a hundred bike abs or you know a bunch of just a bunch of crazy sit-ups to kind of burn out at the end and feel them burn and then and I if I remember correctly though I think what fed into that at least for me is I remember reading something back then about the type of muscle fibers that you have in your abs and your calves and that high repetitions tend to they would say tend to be better for for those reasons right that they can handle there's most slow twitch muscle fibers that they recover faster and the case they would make is you know the abs and calves or muscles that you're you're constantly using all day long so they need high reps to respond to repetitive stress and so I fell into this trap and for many years I trained it that way myself and my clients and I'll and I don't I wish I remember what I read or what it was when I thought you know what I'm gonna go I'm gonna I've never tried I've never lifted five reps on abs never rep did five reps on calves and those two things were one of the most pivotal things that I ever did for both calves and abs was switched to doing really high or really low reps and heavy weight because I had been so focused on high reps and I saw this boost on both those areas right away yeah so what it came from and it's such a stupid myth but what it came from is when they do analysis of different muscles they can see though they can kind of do you know they do a biopsy and they'll look at the breakdown between fast twitch by the way this is a really really rough generalizations more complicated than this but they'll say okay there's a ratio of you know two to one fast twitch to slow twitch or whatever fast twitch muscle fibers are the ones that produce power and strength but they also burn out very quickly so it's like a car with a v10 it's going to burn the gas very fast it's a lot of power and it goes quarter mile super fast slow twitch muscle fibers they last longer they're your endurance muscle fibers but they burn energy much slower and so they last longer as well so it's like a car with a you know two-cylinder engine it's like a Prius yeah you're going to go for much longer but it ain't going to go that fast now the fast twitch muscle fibers they have the greatest propensity for growth because the bigger they get the better they do their job slow twitch muscle fibers now they can also grow but they grow at a much much lower and slower capacity because as they get bigger they require more energy and one of the things that you're asking your slow twitch muscle fibers to do is to have lots of staying power so it doesn't make sense for example to have a two-cylinder car and say i want it to go farther so i'm going to make it a four-cylinder doesn't make any any sense what you want to do is make it more efficient so the fast twitch muscle fibers grow and this is why lifting weights makes your muscles build and why doing super long endurance type of stuff doesn't make your muscles build it's why long distance runners look the way they do and why sprinters look the way they do okay now what they do is they look at the they do the muscle biopsies and they say oh abs have more slow twitch than than the than the delts therefore train him slow twitch look it doesn't matter the fact remains training fast twitch muscle fibers results in more building and more shape and more sculpting training and higher reps result results in more endurance and stamina now high reps again to a certain point can still build but if you stay there all the time which is what people do they'll do 20 reps for abs and they only ever do 20 rap they never play in the 10 rep or the eight rep range so they lose the effects that those could produce i also think that that that what came with that too is just you know like our training certifications um you know they're you're gonna you're gonna lean on the safer route oh yeah and it's like you know if you take somebody who doesn't have good um ab control and then you load them with heavy weight you wouldn't do that with any body part right yep exactly so then they're especially if we know like you brought up earlier about the so as being attached to the low back and then what that can do as far as that can strain people and they're all like every time i do abs i feel it in my low back and then you're sitting here telling me adam and sal that i should add load to that too not a good idea so as trainers you a lot of them started to to i think lean on the oh let's do the safer route i know i know my clients are gonna throw her back out doing body weight crunches to a hundred you know right right where if i gave her you know 15 pound medicine ball and told her to do it slow and control for five like maybe she'd be at risk more no no this does not negate the fact this is true for all body parts for all exercises that form is extremely important so if you so i'll put it this way let's say you do 50 reps on a physical ball uh for crunches which by the way the physical ball is one of my favorite favorite tools for working the core yeah and i'll get into that it was made for it oh it's amazing for it i'll get into that a little bit later but let's say you do 50 reps on the physical ball and you do a bunch of crunches and i want you to do high resistance you know what i'm gonna do i'm gonna perfect your form and slow you down and that's all i need to do usually i don't need to add weight now adding weight once you have the perfect form then you can start to add resistance to your perfect form but what i don't what's and i'm glad you brought this up adam what you don't want to do is right now hang up on the you know you're done with this this podcast and you go and add resistance yeah how about you perfect your form the range of motion the squeeze and what you may find is that your reps are low automatically because now you're doing the right thing with your form now and when you get something we haven't touched on that that it's also another great benefit inside effect and something i used to always present to clients on the importance of us training this and getting strong here is your core and your abs this is your internal weight belt totally this is you get really good at that and you know you get strong in your core and abs this is what helps prevent you from throwing your back out when you go over and you pick up a 50 pound you know bag of dog food or you're doing something like that because you've put the work into really understanding how to control your abs i mean i know you guys do this because you're trainers i try and teach my clients to do this and when you when you learn it starts first with the mind muscle connection right working on the on the neurological level first once you learn and understand how to connect to the abs and activate them then you treat you you train that behavior you make it a habit that anytime i go to do something that could potentially compromise it i always think my abs like i don't go pick a thing of dog food up and do it mindlessly no you brace your core yeah even though i could deadlift four five hundred pounds it doesn't mean that i don't still brace my core even for 50 pounds it's a habit that i've taught myself when i hinge over i bend over i grab something just sitting down yeah for long periods of time is just to be conscious of that and like your posture and then like being able to to keep embrace that that position so i want to reinforce like better positioning and i could do that by focusing on like my abs controlling that you just reminded me of something else that i've been meaning to make a youtube video on this for a long time and i got to do make a note for this dug because i need to do this i've been wanting to shoot a youtube video of me sitting in my car and showing people because so i suffer from what a lot of people suffer from which is like an anterior pelvic tilt so my looks like my ass is kind of sticking out a little bit which you know it can contract the low back in my low back i g model right and it can get and yeah exactly and it gets really tight and there's two main factors from or there's multiple factors but two of the major things that's going on there is i'm in that position because i have a low i have weak abs i'm not training them as much as i should be and addressing the imbalance of what what like the hip flexors now once once you understand how to connect right and the problem so the problem is ass is sticking out too much the opposite of fixing that is squeezing the glutes and and actually activating and rotating the pelvis right you can do this in your car you can do this on the plane so a lot of times i know there's people listening right now that can relate to this because this happened you used to happen to me all the time i sit in the car for a half hour hour or i'm on a plane for an hour and all i get and all i've been doing is sitting and my low back is just all that's where you feel the most right it's it's because i'm i'm relaxed but your hip flexors sitting on the joint exactly and i'm sitting on the joints and my and it's stressing it so much and something that i love to practice is you know i become aware of that and while i'm driving i'll squeeze the glutes i'm doing it right now as we're talking and i'll rotate the hips even in this position because i've done the work of understanding how to connect i understand my issue and that i need to tuck that tailbone underneath it i can create little ways of exercising throughout the day to do that and i tell you what it's like how we talk about mobility and the importance of that these are this is one of those things that this is even better than one 60 minute hard workout all day or one 60 minute workout a week of hard abs you'd be far better off understanding the function of the abs and then learning how to create these little behaviors when you sit in your car you activate and squeeze the glutes and and contract the abs and you're sitting on the plane you do it when you're standing up watching your kids play sports instead of kind of slouch over you can you can do that you're reinforcing good patterns good recruitment right and this is what we're trying to stress because that's going to set you up for then you know being able to load the abs and being able to really build and develop them even further just like any other muscle but it has to be promoting the proper function yeah what i like to tell people because sometimes you tell people brace your core squeeze your core and they almost don't know like what do you mean squeeze like how do i do that pretend like someone's about to tickle you or poke you in the stomach yeah you kind of you brace it a little bit yeah that's all that's all you do is you brace your core and then you'll find you also all of a sudden have so much more stability in your low back because i think people forget that the spine they think the back part of your body is what supports the spine which is part of it but it's the spine is it goes all the way around so it's all the muscles that surround the spine that support it including the lats including the glutes these muscles that are a little further also support the lower spine but they all create that that stability but look at the end of the day if you want a midsection that's visible if you want one that looks impressive focus on building the muscles of your midsection just like you would for your legs or your arms or your delts like like i'll give you an example finally it's taking a long time but finally women have understood that if they want their butt to look good they need to build it for a long time it was like like like what we're talking about for for abs and core training high reps and just got to get leaner and it's like the glutes are a muscle if you build them your butt is going to look a lot better and now they're starting to get that you're seeing women squat and deadlift and Romanian deadlift and hip thrust which is phenomenal and people are developing amazing glutes this is true for the midsection too if you want a midsection that looks tight and impressive even at higher body fat percentages train them to build them and what but of course perfect form and watch what happens here's another thing that i think a lot of people i think people realize this part but they do it wrong the you know for a long time we've been told to train abs frequently definitely some truth in that i think that's true for all muscles but there's another part that goes to that which is if you train your midsection frequently let's say three days a week or four days a week it's important to manipulate the intensity so what i mean by that is you're not going to train your abs you know for an hour four days a week super super hard unless you are like the the most fit core person in the world that's just way too much and just like that would burn out other parts of your body it would not allow your midsection time to adapt and recover and build so you do want to manipulate the intensity so if you're working out really frequently with your midsection some of the workouts should be higher intensity some of them should be lower intensity and then if you really want to have fun and get your abs in your midsection to respond throw in some trigger sessions for the midsection this right here is an absolute game changer so for people who don't know what a trigger session is trigger sessions are low intensity very frequent bouts of short bouts of exercise where all you're trying to do is feel the muscle work get a little bit of a pump and that's it it's separate from your normal traditional workouts it works for anybody part if i want my biceps to respond i'll do some band curls three times a day on the days i'm not really hitting them in the gym and just get a little bit of a pump and i'll watch my biceps change very quickly this is also true for the midsection well that philosophy is very similar to what i'm talking about with just doing it i mean it's an isometric version of it right so you're saying trigger in general that's a trigger session right exactly it's it's not me i'm not i don't get off the plane and i'm sweating and my abs aren't sore from that it's just me connecting connecting remind reminding that reminding my brain that this is where my bodies needs to be positioned my abs are having to work but it's not so intense that you know the next day i'm gonna be sore and i can't use them and actually promotes recovery so then that way you go into like a more loaded stressful type workout and you do this in between i'm recovering i'm getting more blood flow i'm getting activity but it's not at a high intensity where it's actually gonna be damaging it's gonna be actually promoting a healing aspect it actually sends a very small muscle building signal which when you combine it with your traditional workouts it amplifies the entire muscle building system i mean you see this this is something that you witness and people that don't work out but that have jobs that require them to to you know use a body part very frequently look at the look at your mechanics hands and forearms go find a mechanic who's been doing it for 20 years look at their forearms and hands the rest of their body could be out of shape and you'll notice very muscular looking forearms look at the calves of male carriers i this one this is what blew me away i might you know my when i was my x y's family has several male male carriers in their family and i noticed when it was summer and they'd wear shorts or whatever every single and they would be out of shape or whatever another they don't train they just deliver mail but they're walking miles every day beautiful cat every single one of them had these really muscular calves so that's kind of what trigger sessions do now by themselves you'll get a little bit something but when you combine it with your traditional workouts boy does that blow everything away and when it comes to the midsection if you're listening to this podcast and you're kind of getting your mind blown and you're like okay i want to see like how developed i could get my midsection in the next two to three months like you want to really put a turbo on it throw in some trigger sessions and kind of watch what happens but again form is imperative for all body parts especially for the mid section one thing i want to get back to is the physio ball and the reason why i want to get back to that is because the physio ball has this interesting curve of popularity in the fitness space it got introduced in the late 90s early 2000s and everybody was like wow there's lots of benefit if i have my clients do shoulder presses on this or rows with the hand stabilizing or you know whatever they're getting great results it's good for stability it makes them focus on their full let's use it for every exercise and then it went crazy and then it was like we're not using benches anymore we're not using heavy barbells anymore let's stand on a physio ball and do weird stuff and one-legged you know crazy stuff and it just went way too far so physio balls went from being super popular to just like nobody wants to use them anymore which i think is stupid because somewhere in the middle is their value and in some of their biggest value is for core training well i'm glad you went this direction because you know early on we came out and actually talked a lot of shit about this type of training because it's it was the the quote unquote functional training that was abused like that went crazy and and like many things there's always exceptions to the rule and like many things in the fitness space something that if we find out is good we end up abusing or exaggerating but that doesn't mean that it's not a phenomenal tool still it's just how you utilize it and i can't help but think so i'm giving the analogy of the the lower cross syndrome when i talk about the anterior pelvic tilt the sticking the ass out the low back issues going on the the lower cross syndrome is what that is right so that's and it's so common that you know seven out of ten people have some version of it and some more more extreme than others if you have low chronic back pain more often than not this is an issue and when i would train clients especially clients in advanced age this was always an issue and so here's an example how i love utilizing the physio ball and you wouldn't even think because it has nothing to do with that muscle group but here's how a trainer can utilize this tool i would love to teach a a chest press yes on a ball and but here's the difference i don't just put their upper back on there and i'm not just focusing on the chest i'm making them bridge yeah and and what that bridge so bridging is bringing their hips up so they get on there and by the way this like would roast a client and they're doing they're doing a chest exercise but then their their glutes and their abs get roasted because they're having to stay bridged the entire time so i'll get a client who is you know that we we don't need to be doing really really heavy weight because i'm still working on their mechanics to get better control with the bench which here's where i love the stability ball i put them on there they're a little unstable which forces them to slow down be controlled with their form also forces them to activate their core and their abs to stabilize and then i get them to engage their hips squeeze their butt and bridge up and keep that so now i'm working on an issue that they have also all at the same time here is where the physio ball is phenomenal it's excellent i i it's okay you know you talk about the z-press a lot and how amazing it is for shoulder development and how built your shoulders the reason why the z-press was so why adam loves it so much why all of us enjoy it so much is not because you're sitting on the floor it's not it has the floor plays a role but there's nothing magic about the floor but what it forces you to do is to have perfect form and get full extension and all of a sudden your delts get this amazing activation physio balls can do that for a lot of different body parts but here's why i love them for the core when you're doing a sit-up or a crunch on the floor the for a bench they are flat they're totally flat which your spine is not your spine full range of motion for the abs goes from crunch this is where the lumbar spine crunches forward it flexes forward right but it also goes down to flat and then beyond where you get what's called full extension you can't do that on other you can't do that on the floor unless you put like a towel under your back and do also but a way harder you can't do it on a bench but if you do a proper physio ball crunch or sit-up proper nobody does it right but if you do it right it is literally one of the most effective exercises to do for your it complements that natural curve in your lower back like no other tool that you can get so it's just a great it's a great way to learn the technique of full extension and being able to go through that full range of motion I don't know any other tool that provides that kind of support no it literally a ball is curved and so when you lay on a ball and if you allow if you start to figure out like okay this is how my spine should articulate so I can work the abs through its full range of motion you if you allow and you keep your hips up if you allow your spine to arch over the ball and then crunch again over the ball while maintaining hip position up at the top you are working your abs through a full range of motion and if I'm telling you right now eight out of ten of you listening if you do this right you'll find yourself shaking you'll find that you can only do six to ten proper reps I mean my go to ab building exercise till this day is a physio ball crunch with my arms extended over my head it's known as a long lever crunch it's got a lot of resistance I can do maybe 10 or 12 when I really really do it right and they just build my abs and all I need is a basic physio ball you could buy it anywhere the caveat to that though is that you do need to have really good form in the program you do a really good job of breaking the detail down on all the things that you need to be thinking about it's one of those exercises where like the plank someone sees it and they try and emulate it and they completely mess it up totally there are a lot of little nuances that they're not hard they just you need to understand it and you need to be queued it and once you get the cues down and you and you focus on it it can become in my opinion too one of the best movements that you can do but how you do it is so important how you do it is the difference between working your hip flexors and not getting much core activation and kind of wasting your time between that and really getting an effective core muscle building work out where you could start to see the abs develop where you could see them higher body fat percentages like we've been talking about that's how important form is so kind of just sum things up okay you know if you're training your core right now one of the best things you could do is phase your workouts include some higher resistance type exercises where you're doing six to 10 reps those will build your core like of course perfect perfect form then throw in some phases with some higher reps higher reps aren't bad just like lower reps aren't bad but if all you ever do or one or the other then they start to lose their value so you definitely want to phase your workouts you if you really want to develop your core and you want to get it there in a faster way of doing it train your core about three days a week throw some trigger sessions on the side and if you want more structure if you want to follow a program now I created this program back in I think Doug said 2014 so if you want to see the 2014 version of Sal and see why I talk about you know aging and dog years you get to see a young version of myself but I created that program 2014 the original videos are in there in fact I filmed it in my personal training studio this is back when I used to have a personal training isn't it the only program Doug that we still have that actually has old the original videos it's the only one that we have not but a lot of that it's because it's still so damn good yeah it's I mean a lot of the other ones needed the the facelift really bad but the that program is still it's still awesome yes it'll hold today and I I instruct throughout the program so rather than you know watching someone do it with bullet points I'm actually teaching you as a trainer would teach you I think that's really important especially with working the core again it's in my old personal training studio to follow this particular program you just need something you can hang off of so it can be a pull-up bar or something you can hang off of a physio ball and resistance bands because I do include rotational exercises for the obliques it's called the no BS six-pack formula and we've had it since the first days of mind pumping again it's one of our more popular program and I think because we're doing this episode right now because so many people are stuck at home we'll make that program half off which makes it very it's a very inexpensive program now something I don't remember if this is in there let me know if it is if it's not I do think it's something that somebody should go look at on our youtube channel it was one of the first viral or more popular videos that we ever did was your hip flexor deactivator yes that's in our youtube channel I'm oh god I'm so glad you brought that up so that's it if you have a lot of trouble with your hip flexors totally taking over or just have a hard just if you're somebody who has a hard time feeling in your abs yes this is this is the video for you it's an exercise that it'll deactivate your your your hip flexors and teach you how to feel things in your core it's not the best muscle building core exercise it's one that helps you connect so that you can do the ones that help yeah you gotta learn the technique it's a great start totally and again we're gonna we'll put it half off which makes it literally it's a $28.50 program so it's super inexpensive it's a full ab and core workout it's at nobs6pack.com so that's n-o-b-s the number six p-a-c-k.com and then if you use the code nobs50 that's nobs50 then you'll get the 50% off and also you can go to mindpumpfree.com we got lots of free guides there cost nothing and if you want to find us all on instagram you can find Justin at Mind Pump Justin you can find me at Mind Pump Sal and Adam at Mind Pump Adam