Ripped abs are the main point that makes the body become better looking and attractive. You don't need a huge body but having ripped abs surely can put you ahead most people. I have 10 fail-proof steps for you to get jacked abs in a fast and easy way.
We'll attack your belly without definition in two ways: in one side, we'll take on the fat to get it out and make the muscle appear, and on the other side we'll attack the muscle, to get it stronger and better defined. The first step is to understand your abs are already ripped, the abdominal musculature already has its outlines, but what usually happens is that you have that lard cover over it which hides it. I like the example of a body lying down.
Imagine anyone you want. If you want to cover that person with a bedsheet, you can see in detail, even, what's underneath. But with a duvet, just the outline.
You can't know who that is. When we are talking about the duvet, that's the fat "cover", and a body fat percentage above 20% is that huge duvet. When you are around 15% it's like the blanket.
Around 10%, we can see those nice abs, and below 10% around 7%, you have what I consider the ideal physique for the beach, in which you take your shirt off and will grab attention and be attractive, but we live on an Instagram world, and you look at Ramon Dino going up on the Arnold Classic stage, around 3% of body fat, and those aren't healthy abs. Our body needs an amount of fat for its own health. Being around 8% is already great, you'll have nice abs, sometimes the person has low body fat but the abs don't appear, because they need muscle.
- They need to stand out. - You're weak. The second point is not doing exercises directed to "local fat".
Listen, there's no exercise to burn fat. What you'll do is for the muscle. The muscle is here, and the fat is above it.
The exercise works down here. The fat stays there. There's no specific exercise, we talked about this a lot, about exercises people do but in fact are a waste of time, they are useless.
Now, the third step. I want you to remember step 1, about muscle volume. When the muscle is small, it's harder to see.
When it's bigger, it's easier. That's why this step tells you to train abs the hard way. You'll go as intense as possible, the same way you'd train any other muscle.
Men like to train their arms and chest, and they go hard. Women tend to train their thighs more. Sure, there are exceptions, but how do they train those muscles?
They go hard. - Why should we go easy on the abs? - Lazy!
I'll just do 50 thousand crunches. It's low intensity. You need to develop those muscles, make it bigger.
We are talking about something related to hypertrophy, which is the intensity of work for that muscle. When we talk about training for that, we also talk about it. - It's one of the steps.
- Relax! Our fourth step to get you those jacked abs quickly and effectively, is not getting into drastic diets. What do I see people do?
People wanting to get shredded, taking their carbs off, doing tons of crazy diets. Stop! Don't do that.
You'll lose weight with those diets, yes, but that weight comes from muscle mass and water. This also causes an impact we call Rebound Effect. Have you heard of the Accordion Effect?
You enter a drastic diet, your body understands that there is a lack of energy, so it lowers your metabolism, it wants to keep you alive. Then, after this diet, you end up eating more. Your body then starts storing fat.
What will you do? Run the numbers. What time did you wake up, what did you eat and at what time, map everything to know what you are eating, and take the junk food away.
This will make you evolve a lot. After that, I would recommend one or two free meals every week at the start. As you progress, you go to one free meal, the perfect standard.
Once per week, you eat whatever you want. All this will make you fall in line, and this will make you have control over it, but it won't be enough to control the appetite. It's one thing to eat so and so, but you want to eat more, and if that doesn't solve it, Oficial has products which increase satiety, in many different ways.
One of them is a pill you ingest with water, it becomes a sponge in your stomach, preventing you from eating more and also bringing that satiety. Those products help with your exaggerated appetite. The fifth step is understanding that there is no way of removing fat from here and not from here.
For your body, it's the same. Fun fact: did you know you have more fat on your back than in your abs? But you can see your abs, you can say "I want to take this away".
What do I mean? The fat which bothers you isn't the place with the most fat, but the place you see, and your body doesn't care. Your body will take your fat away generally.
What works is taking the liquid retention away, which expels the exceeding water. It's simple. Just drink more water.
Our body works like this: I need to maintain this human alive, as much as they are an idiot and want to kill me, - as we do this many times. - You wanna die? Huh?
I need water. If I don't drink water, I'll retain it. It has water, because then your fat which is not at a high level, looks bigger because your body retains water in the subcutaenous tissue, the lard!
And how do you do this? Will this solve your life? Easy, grab a calculator.
- Put your weight in there. -70 kilos. Multiply that by 35: 2450.
Let's round it to 2. 5. We have to drink 2,5 liters it's what Raniel needs, what our body needs, to keep itself alive in a healthy way.
Will we pee a lot? Your body has accumulated water, and then you start drinking. The information is that the water in the body is not necessary, - and it doesn't vanish.
What happens? - Think about it. You'll need to pee that water away.
In the beginning, yes, you will have diuresis, because you need to take that water away. After 3 or 4 days you'll get used to it. The seventh step is about your abdominal training.
What you need to understand is that our body respects an idea: if the stimulus is weak, it doesn't provoke any adaptation. That's called stress theory. If the stimulus is strong, your body understands it needs to adapt.
If you have a weak training, your body understands that it doesn't need to do anything. If you have a strong workout, and I'll go into that, it understands that it needs adaptation. What is that adaptation for your abs?
It's being stronger, having more volume, being more defined. First, you need to load it up. Your abdominal muscles need to have a load in the exercise, it needs intensity and difficulty, so from the moment it has a hard time doing it, the stimulus is strong.
The second step is doing ample abdominal movements. Not just those short, weak ones. I want your abs to go through the hypertrophy effect, and for that there are many things we use, one of them is the range of motion, the muscle needs to shorten and elongate a lot, it needs to get all of the things that are good for hypertrophy and muscle mass increase and apply it to your abs.
An exercise that is not that good in terms of elongation is the regular sit-up, because if you are elongating, the abs rest, this exercise will be good for a starter at home, because its demand level is low, but if you are a bit more evolved, you can get that same exercise and put in in a machine, which provides bigger tension during the whole movement arc. If this information is a bit vague, we made a video about the two best and two worst abdominal exercises. How many times should you train it?
Once, twice? I'll tell you, you need it everyday. Studies show that the muscle development does not depend on how many times per week you train, but the entire weekly volume.
You can give it a more vertical stimulation, doing three exercises with 3 sets in only one day, and repeat that again in the week. If you do three exercises with three sets, how many is that in total? - Nine!
- Repeat that again during the week. - How many sets on the week? - Nine plus nine, eighteen!
- Niiiiice! - Genius! 18 sets during the week.
What can you wisely do? You can get those 18 sets and do this stimulus horizontally, so you can get 18 sets - and divide it by 3. - That's six!
You did 18 in two installments. Now, get that total volume and divide it by the number of sets I want to do every day. I want to do 3 sets each day.
How many exercises is that, Raniel? Oh man, that's hard! One exercise!
We are talking about six days during the week, which means you can train abs twice a week, you can train it every day, what changes is the volume. That's protocol building. A lot of math involved, and I'm not talking about progression, periodization, I talk about all this in Muscle 60D, and that's why I say that it gives you one year of results in 2 months.
This is just the tip of a complex iceberg. We are talking about a bodybuilding workout for your abs. But there is a powerful ally in this process, which is the cardio training.
Before that, you need to know about the 9th step, which is the idea of starting your workout with abs, doing three sets, to give emphasis on it. The first exercise you'll do. If you warm up, - you can do it regularly, it's good.
- I'm warming up my rotator cuff. And then you go to the abs. But people usually do it in the end.
Why? After the training, are you more or less tired? Will you go harder?
- I just leave. - Let's suppose you do. - I'll go softer.
- Remember, the stronger the stimulus, the more adaptation in your body. We are saying that to make your ab muscles get big. There is something we mentioned about underrated exercises, and this is a great exercise: the plank.
It won't make your abs stronger, but it will control your abdominal walls. In a few days, you'll notice that your abdominal walls will be more controlled! Now, on to our 10th step.
We are talking about building muscles in your entire body. If you don't even have them, let's take one step at a time. When you workout your entire body, you have a higher caloric expenditure, and your body works like this: if it burns more calories than it takes in, it burns fat.
If you consume more calories than you burn, you get fat, and to lose weight you need to burn more fat in terms of caloric deficit. If you burn more calories, you burn more fat. If you train legs, chest, back, and all that, you'll burn calories.
But that's only during the workout. After that, your body starts to regenerate that musculature it trained, and this also burns calories. Now, the best part.
When you lose weight, you want to stay thin. - Do you want to get fat? - No, I don't!
You'll build muscle, because this acquired muscle will consume calories, energy to stay there. Remember the cardio training? It is a powerful ally in calorie burning and in the building of jacked abs that you want, but you need to watch this video because I list 5 mistakes people make when doing cardio, and by watching this video you'll know exactly what to do from now on with your cardio, regardless if you do it or not.
