In Part One, we covered the reasons we wrote NROL for Abs, and you explained your core-training philosophy and methodology. But core training is maybe one-fifth of the program in our book.
Let’s start with mobility, since that’s the way readers will start all the workouts. Pretend I’m a reader who picks up this book with the goal of finding a bunch of exercises that’ll help me get ripped abs. How do you convince me that the mobility exercises are just as important as the core training? What do I lose if I don’t work on mobility?
AC: Take a look at most 70 year olds and get back to me! That should be reason enough.
Let me illustrate this with a story. When I got out of the hospital in 2006 I was struggling to regain fitness. As part of my “comeback” training I was doing multiple sets of push ups. I think I had worked up to 4 when my Dad came to visit from Scotland.
Watching me struggle, my Dad dropped to the floor and banged out 10 “marine style” push ups (where you clap your hands in front of you between each rep). He was 64 at the time!
About 18 months later I was visiting him and challenged him to see how many he could do. At this point my Dad was unable to get into the push up position.
What had happened in the 18 months?
He’d retired. My Dad had a physical job all his life. Since retirement he’d become sedentary and lost mobility faster than any other qualities..
Mobility is the one thing we take for granted that can enhance all our other training, and our overall quality of life the most.
So I’ve done the mobility exercises, and I’ve done the core training. I finally move on to the weight room. But once I get there, the strength workouts in NROL for Abs have me doing all kinds of things I’ve never done before.
There’s a bench press where my shoulders are on the end of the bench and my feet are on the floor, with my torso completely off the bench. There’s a one-arm row where I have one hand on a bench, my feet on the floor, and my body in a plank position. And there are some squats and deadlifts that are so evil I can’t really describe them to a family audience.
People who know you know that you do everything for a reason – every exercise is part of an overall training mechanism. Take one part out, and you’ve changed the entire program.
So why these exercises? What do they offer that you can’t get from the basic movements?
AC: My goal was to present an athletically challenging program where we are training core “all the time”. Of course there are some traditional exercises in there, but in order to provide a new stimulus I wanted to provide some more challenging exercises for people, rather than just say “Add 5lbs and start over”.
Once you get past Phase One of the program, the workouts finish with 5 to 10 minutes of metabolic training. The exercises themselves are pretty simple – burpees, kettlebell swings, body-weight squats, push-ups. But they kicked my ass. I started doing the metabolic training at the beginning of the workouts because if I waited until the end, I didn’t have the energy for them.
Even so, I got leaner on this program than I’d been in years. This isn’t really a question so much as an observation that if you want to get lean, you have to get way the hell out of your comfort zone at least once or twice a week.
AC: I think everyone needs direct metabolic training. The problem is that for years we’ve prescribed traditional cardiovascular exercises (jogging, cycling etc).
If we think about jogging, one mile is around 1500 plyometric reps with forces of 2-4 times bodyweight. If our goal is just to challenge the metabolism and cardio systems of the body – that’s a ton of joint stress. Cycling reduces the loads obviously, but of course there are more repetitions involved.
So the way we do “cardio” at Results Fitness is to do high intensity metabolic circuits where we take something like the kettlebell swing and perform density circuits. Studies came out of Truman State last year showing kettlebell swings to have an oxygen cost higher than running (with similar heart rate responses), but with about 20% of the reps performed when compared to a mile run.
Basically it’s a more effective and safer option than traditional cardio when the goal is purely cardio conditioning and calorie burning.
The downside, you’re going to have to work!
–
AC
PS – You can pick up a copy of the New Rules of Lifting for Abs – HERE .
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