It’s been nearly eight months since I looked in the mirror and was shocked to six-pack abs in the mirror.
I was just three days shy of my fiftieth birthday, and building a six-pack wasn’t on my mind.
Building six-pack abs wasn’t even part of my plan, all I was really trying to do was get back some lost flexibility. I just wanted to be able to touch my toes again, without bending my knees.
Between March and April of 2012 my weight fluctuated between 185 and 190 pound, way better than the obese 225 pounds I was the year before, but still overweight.
I had been using my Ab Wheel faithfully for about six-months, after a two-year hiatus, and my abs repertoire wasn’t working as advertised. I’m not just talking about doing standard crunches, I also did crossed leg crunches, oblique crunches, bicycle crunches and reverse crunches.
In all I spent a good, hard thirty-minutes working my abs, every day, day in, day out with no days off.
And no results to speak of.
I stopped doing any abs work except for my Ab Wheel, new research has shown that standard crunches and sit-ups didn’t properly work your abs anyway, so why do wasted movements?
I stuck with the Ab Wheel because it’s almost a full upper-body workout in itself.
The Ab Wheel works your arms, shoulders and chest on the drive forward and builds your rectus abdominis, the six-pack muscle, on the return movement. Drive off to the right and the left and you also work your obliques.
Still no luck, and no six-pack either.
The Ab Wheel works your whole rectus abdominis, but as anyone who has tied to build six-pack abs can attest the lower abs are the hardest to show, and impossible to isolate.
Reverse crunches do not isolate you lower abs, contrary to popular belief.
Good thing I didn’t know that a year ago or I would never have made my awesome discovery and built my first set of six-pack abs in almost thirty years. The first and only other time I had a six-pack I was twenty-two, I’m fifty-one now.
I got out all my old workout videos and DVD’s to look for movements that would work my lower abs and had a thought, “Why not kill two birds with one stone?”
I designed a series of calisthenics that I thought would both work my lower abs and lengthen my hamstrings. Front kicks for my abs and hamstrings, two types of knee raises for my obliques and transverse abdominis and some back kicks for my hamstrings and glutes.
I later added Standing Bicycle Crunches and a modified Horse Stance move to round out my routine to a full body workout.
I started doing my new stretching and calisthenics routine in May of 2012, by the end of May I had lost thirteen pounds without really trying.
Then I got sick in June, I lost twelve pounds of muscle but not the right way.
In July when I was feeling better I got back into my stretching and calisthenics, without touching my resistance machine for a real test, four-weeks later I had my first six-pack in twenty-eight years.
My whole stretching and calisthenics workout takes twenty-two minutes, not bad for building six-pack abs.
Michael Cole