Doing sit-ups will give you a more defined abdomen for 2 reasons: if you don't have strong muscles, your belly becomes protruding and relaxed. And another thing, if you look at my abdomen, you notice that there is a difference in height, precisely the height where my finger is, which is the groove of the abdomen, where there is no muscle, and where there is muscle. This muscle is bigger, so it creates a difference in height between where there is muscle and where there is no muscle, and this will give you an aspect of definition.
I'm going to lie on the floor as it is right here, with nothing. You can put a mat, a towel if you don't have one, it also works, or you go in roots mode like me, without anything. An interesting point is to leave your knee flexed and your foot on the floor, this will bring you greater comfort here in your lower back.
What will happen when I put my foot down? Did you notice it went up? This curvature here, during sets and repetitions, can cause discomfort in your lower back.
Let's go to the first mistake, which is pulling your head. There are people who do the abdominal exercise and end up using a lot of force to pull their head. People force your arm, and as your hand is pulling your head, you end up pulling it.
We put our hands behind our head, and some people even leave it on the side, just to support the weight of their head. Here, in your neck, you have the cervical spine. The aim is to make the exercise more comfortable for your spine.
And don't use force in that region. Following this idea, people joke that it's the "neck", and they do that. Instead of doing the exercise for the abdomen, the person does a neck flexion, and when you do the movement only on the neck, first, you will fatigue the neck muscles.
Second, you will strain your entire region, your spine. You won't do the exercise on your abdomen, because much of the movement will be in your neck. You'll waste your time and you'll still be straining your spine, that sucks.
- Shit! I do these images with one hand so you can visualize what is happening in the cervical region, but when you do them, do them with both hands. The third error is a well-intentioned one.
The person does it but shouldn't. You move your entire body up. This type of sit-up is completely unnecessary, even because the abdominal muscles, to do a good job on it, you will flex the spine, and the specific flexion of the spine is small.
When the body rises as a whole, it is flexing the hips, and then we have the participation of other muscles such as the iliopsoas and rectus femoris, that is, it is not the abdomen. From a certain angle of work, the abdomen only does the work of stabilization, and not the work of lengthening and shortening, which is what we want. The proposal is not to go all the way up, but rather to go up to that point.
Do you notice that my spine flexes and here it locks? The abdomen has this to deliver, and my spine has this flexion to deliver. If you notice, from here onwards I have hip flexion, look how it flexed.
Here, he stopped flexing, and then I returned to having exactly the movement at the top of the spine. This upward movement is unnecessary, but there is an interesting point: if you have a lot of fat in this region, there is no way to perform a miracle, we need to take care of this issue too. We pay so much attention to this that students who sign up for Muscle 60D not only receive the availability of our nutritionists on WhatsApp, but also a completely personalized diet according to their routine and even their dietary preferences.
You can be my student and have access throws the exercise in the trash. When you exercise, it is important to keep your muscles tense. Look at my abdomen as it is now.
It's contracted, and if I continue going down, it relaxes. What happens during exercise? You may be going up, tense, and everything goes down.
He went down and relaxed, tense, relax, tense, relax. This is a mistake. The idea is to keep it contracted all the time.
How will you resolve this issue? You will lie down normally, and place your hand on your abdomen. You will feel him relax, and then it will begin climbing your trunk, not much.
You can already tell that your muscles have tightened. Then I take my shoulders off the floor. This is the zero point of the exercise, and I'm going to go up until I lock here, that's enough.
I go back to the point where the abdomen is contracted. You may ask at this point "Wow, Lalá, is the exercise really short? " That's exactly what Rani said.
I thought this short thing was wrong. This exercise is really short. Your spine doesn't give you a large flexion angle, and we want to flex your spine.
When we go to an area called kinesiology and we see what the muscles do and what movement they produce, which is the case of the abdomen, what movement does it produce? Spine flexion. Everything you do that isn't flexing your spine, your abs will be doing stabilization work at most.
It's not what we want, so we focus on spinal flexion. In addition to flexing the spine, we have a mistake that people make and have a lot of doubts about. In all the years that I've worked as a teacher and as a personal trainer, the main point of questioning and doubts people have about the abdomen is breathing.
- Is it important? - Very important. So, if you breathe better, you will get more out of the exercise.
Think that if you go up, you tighten everything, you compress it. In here you have your lungs. If you have a lung full of air and go up, do you agree that it won't work very well?
It's like you want to squeeze a full balloon. It's very simple, when you go up, won't you tighten, contract everything? It's interesting that the lung is empty.
So when I come up, I let the air out. I release everything, and go down pulling. Very calmly.
You will always release the air at the top, and of course, you will come down pulling. If you don't think, if you just think about doing the exercise, your body will handle it on its own, intuitively you will do the right thing. I often did this with my students: "Lalá, how do I breathe?
" Don't think, do the exercise. Forget breathing. And then I observed and the person was breathing correctly.
Your body is super intelligent, it will do the right thing. And there’s even a tip to make this exercise better. I placed my feet on the floor, the distance between my legs will be what is comfortable for you.
Left it away, spine supported, and I can place my fingers intertwined behind my head to create support for my neck, or I can leave it that way. This can cause fatigue in your neck muscles, especially if you start now, if you are not used to it. You can support here.
To avoid this swaying of the neck, which cannot be done, you can place a wedge here, look how interesting it is. Here we use it a lot for students who are just starting out. Place your entire hand down here, the other hand as if it were a cup, and you support it.
You'll notice that you can't move your neck. Leave it supported and when it's time to go up, you go up until your abdomen locks. It locks, and I go down until that moment where he keeps tension.
I went up again, breathing out. This is perfect, and if you do it this way, even though it's an exercise at home, with your body weight, it will be a great work on your abs, but we still managed to include that tip to make it "Lalá's Abs". Inside your abdominal wall, there is, in addition to this muscle that is more external, of the squares, another transverse abdominal muscle, and this muscle is responsible for keeping your abdomen more controlled.
If it is stronger, firstly, your abdomen will be more inward, and secondly, your waist will be smaller, exactly because it is shaped like a belt on our body. What we will do is strengthen this transverse abdominis. Simply put, you will optimize the exercise, you don't need to do anything else.
When you come up and breathe normally, I will ask you to exhale very forcefully. Furthermore, when you rise and exhale forcefully, you will pull your abdominal wall inward. By doing these two things you can activate more of the transversus abdominis, in addition to the rectus abdominis, you will do work for it, because this muscle is involved in pulling your abdomen in and releasing that air with force, the same exercise giving you more results due to this adjustment.
Now that you've learned how to do the training the right way, the training remains. This video is exactly about abdominal training at home.
