 First question is from Noah K35. What are the best exercises to build abs out? I've tried hanging leg raises, but I can't get my abs to stick out more. Okay, so building the muscles of the abs- Get them bricks. Is the same as you would approach building any muscle in your body. So the best rep ranges to build muscle for all muscles is between one heavy rep, all the way up to maybe 20 repetitions. Those are all good muscle building ranges. Now with the abs, I would say you probably wouldn't do very well with really, really low reps because it's so hard to have perfect form, but lower reps are okay. And I'm not, I'm talking about like, you don't want to do like a single, like one or two reps, but you can do five, six heavy resistance reps with your abs, and of course you can get up to 20. The key is to use good resistance and here's the other key. Train your abs in a full range of motion. Most people don't do this. They work their abs, but the abs tend to be stabilizers or tend to be kind of placed second fiddle. So using the example of the hanging leg raises, I have yet to see, I've probably seen in my entire career working in gyms, five people do a hanging leg raise properly. Most people just bend, they've bend at the hips, the legs come up or the knees come up, and the abs are stabilizing, but the muscles that are doing the movement, the full range are the hip flexors. The ab function is to bring the pelvis closer to the rib cage or the rib cage closer to the pelvis. So it's literally curling your low back or curling your hips up. So when you do a leg raise, it's not just lifting legs, it's curl, it's tip, it's curling the hips. I hate having this conversation on the podcast. The abs are one of the hardest things to try and articulate on this show. It's something that visually, I have to have something to be able to show a client or actually move their body to get them understand, because it's arguably the probably one of the, I don't know, most commonly done wrong exercise. Yeah, miss a practice. Right, just because even when you have poor form, you look like you're kind of doing it right. And you feel it. Yeah, exactly, and you still feel it because the abs are still, they're working in that if you do a hip flexor sit up, right? You use mostly your hip flexors, abs still work. They're still at least stabilizing at the bare minimum. Maybe you get a little bit of a contraction in it and you look like you're doing it right. So it's really hard to try and explain to somebody on a podcast like how to do this well. But in my experience, when you have somebody who wants to build their abs, one of the best things to do is that low heavy rep range mostly because nobody does it. The novelty of it is the main reason why I think it's the best. But the drawback is that most people already don't know how to connect to the abs very well and do a basic sit up with using all of their abs, much less, okay, now I'm gonna recommend to these people they should go do heavy five. Yeah, that's why we caution, like just all of a sudden going to loading it and doing like a lower rep range if you haven't actually done the work of getting that kind of activation out of your abs. I'm trying to think like, I think that the only one I can think of that probably like for me has always made the most sense to load is like a decline sit up. Yeah, well, here's the thing. Load is all relative. You take somebody who doesn't know how to really work their abs properly, you have them do a physio ball crunch and they're doing low reps. Or a perfect spit up, a spit up sit up. A perfect sit up. Your dad mode. Yes, yes, that was the dad mode. Look at Jesse's bragging about his son. Guys, look, I know kids spit up. My kid does the perfect spit up. Three more. No, it is low reps because they don't have the strength to do more than six or so. I have yet to have a new person put on a physio ball, have them do a proper crunch the right way with full extension, full traction. Try this and here's the best visual I think I could give that most people hopefully can understand is, lie completely straight out flat on your back and try and sit your body at your torso up. As you're trying to think of your spine and the vertebrae and how they look, right? Have everyone seen the skeleton before? Think of the vertebrae and you're trying to roll up each individual vertebrae slow and controlled. Imagine you're a piece of paper rolling. Do they call it the perfect sit up? Yeah, perfect sit up. Try doing five of those. And that's- Try doing one. Right, you're not even gonna be able to probably do one perfect. So that's a great way. That would be technically low rep, heavy loading because you can't even probably do one or two of those really well. And a way to assist yourself is you take a rubber band around like a, you know, like the squat. You can put around your feet even. Yeah, the squat rack or yeah, even your feet, right? And then you use the rubber band to help assist you in that perfect articulation of the spine rolling up. Man, work on that really well and low reps, slow and controlled and then slowly. That's a great video. I don't think we've done that. We did. We did. Were we with the rubber band assistant? I don't know if I've done one with the rubber band but I know we've done- We have a lot of ab videos on the YouTube channel. So we'll make sure to attach some of them in the show notes that demonstrate kind of what we're talking about. I went through this. I remember, I mean, I'd been working out for years until I figured this out. And I remember I got real lean. I was supposed to go on a vacation somewhere. I got really lean and I got my body fat down like nine or 8%. And you could see my abs when I flex them. So you could see like, oh, he's got, you know, flat midsection, he's got nice abs. But when I didn't flex them, they weren't visible. And I was always jealous of the guys that had the abs that just always show. They didn't have to flex, their abs just stuck out. So I thought, God, do I have to get that much leaner? Do I have to get that much more shredded? And I was reading some, you know, muscle magazines or I think I was reading an old bodybuilding book. And in there, they were talking about building the abs so that they showed more at higher body fat percentages. And I thought, well, that makes perfect sense. Cause I know when I develop my quads or my chest or my back, I don't have to necessarily get leaner. It's more visible because there's more muscle. So I thought, I'm going to try to build my abs. And so that's exactly what it is. And I always thought I didn't have a great midsection. I always thought that's just one of my weaknesses. So I started training this way. I started to slow my reps down. I focused on all on lumbar extension inflection. Well, isn't this what inspired you to write the no BS six bank? Yep, absolutely. And I did it and within six months, no joke. I went from the guy who had abs that weren't really visible to they built out so much. If I wore a tight t-shirt, you could see him through my t-shirt. And it was all because I built, I actually started getting pumps on my abs. I would work them out and feel a pump in them like you do with your biceps. They're muscles, just like any other muscle in your body, you have to train them in a similar way. That means you're not doing 100 reps. You're not just going real fast, jerky motion. You're not doing weird light movements. You are using resistance. That may mean that you're not using external resistance, but what I mean by that is pick hard exercises, do them slow, full extension, full squeezing contraction, get the rib cage close to the pelvis, squeeze that, then extend back. Think of it this way. It's like when you're standing straight up, can you take your pelvis and tuck it and stick your butt out? So every time you tuck your tailbone, that's your abs contracting. Every time you stick your butt out, that's your abs lengthening. That's what the abs do. The abs don't bring the legs up to your chest.