The 4-Hour Body_ An Uncommon Guide to Ra - Timothy Ferriss [76]
4. Effectively the same as the 2SDL described in “Pre-Hab.”
5. Expect severe soreness the day after the first two workouts.
6. One of them is my favorite indirect abdominal/core exercise (one-arm, one-leg row), and two are excellent for travel for both genders (one-leg hamstring curls and reverse hyper on Swiss ball).
7. If you are shorter than 5′5″, a 10″ or even 8″ pipe nipple can be used to avoid dangerous brushing of the ground.
SIX-MINUTE ABS
Two Exercises That
Actually Work
“7-Minute Abs. And we guarantee just as good a workout as the 8-minute folk.… If you’re not happy with the first 7 minutes, we’re gonna send you the extra minute free!”
“That’s good. Unless, of course, somebody comes up with 6-Minute Abs. Then you’re in trouble, huh?”
“No! No, no … not 6! I said 7. Nobody’s comin’ up with 6. Who works out in 6 minutes?! You won’t even get your heart goin’, not even a mouse on a wheel.… It’s like you’re dreamin’ about Gorgonzola cheese when it’s clearly Brie time, baby.”
—There’s Something About Mary
HOTEL BEDROOM, NAPA, CALIFORNIA, MAY 2009
“You look like a cat about to vomit.”
My girlfriend had come out of the shower to find me perched on the bed on all fours, stomach heaving.
Taking a huge inhale, I looked up and gave an awkward smile: “Thirty more seconds.… ”
She tilted her head like a Labrador retriever, observing the oddness for a few seconds, then walked back in the bathroom to dry her hair and brush her teeth. She needed to get ready for my friend’s wedding, and my groaning on all fours was far from the strangest thing she’d seen from me.
I continued my routine with a degree of glee.
For the first time in my life, I had reliable six-pack abs.
Cat vomiting rocked.
Single White Male SeekingAbdominals:
Exploring the Path Less Traveled
I’ve never had visible abs.
Even when my bodyfat was low enough to show veins everywhere else, my frontal six-pack—the rectus abdominus—showed almost no separation. Damnation.
Low bodyfat was necessary but not enough.
I performed conventional ab exercises for more than a decade with no discernible benefit, somehow convinced it was just a matter of time. Albert Einstein would call this insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
Things changed only when I began testing basic assumptions in 2009. It took a week to arrive at a reductionist program of two exercises. I performed these exercises just twice a week on Mondays and Fridays after kettlebell swings. In a matter of three weeks, I had my six-pack.
There is just one more prerequisite for visible abs: follow a diet that allows sustained low bodyfat of 12% or less. I suggest the Slow-Carb Diet, as it has the highest compliance rate I’ve ever observed, but other viable options include a ketogenic diet (especially the Cyclical Ketogenic Diet) and intermittent fasting (IF). The latter will be covered in later chapters.
Drew Baye after more than six months of no direct abdominal exercises. It goes to show how diet is often a determining factor. (Photo: Mike Moran)
Movement #1: The Myotatic Crunch
I began my analysis by looking for common attributes in exercises that hadn’t worked. The shared feature of all the dominant exercises, in particular the floor crunch, is that they used no more than half of the full range of motion (ROM) of the abdominals. If you were to imagine yourself sitting in a chair, the prescribed exercises all took you toward your knees (crunch, floor sit-up) or brought your knees toward your chest with a straight back (roman chair, reverse crunch). I decided to ignore that fetal range of motion altogether for eight weeks and focus on the stretched position achieved with full back extension.
The result was the myotatic crunch, so named because it leverages the fully stretched position and the resultant reflex (myotatic reflex or stretch reflex) for a stronger contraction than I had been able to achieve otherwise.
It didn’t take eight weeks to see a difference. It took three.
Since this exercise is also effective for recruiting