abs

You got questions. Hopefully I have the answer. In today’s Q and A. I’m gonna go over how to strengthen your lower abs and achieve better posture. All right. Let’s get right into it. So a question was asked directly to me and said, “Sam, how do I strengthen my lower abs and better my posture?” So I’m gonna dive into this two part question. We’ll go segment by segment.

First, we’re gonna start with lower abs. So something that is a common myth is we can isolate certain segments of our abs. The abdominal muscles, the way they work. They actually… It’s all or nothing. They all contract, or they don’t. So this kind of spotting of the upper and lower abs, is not really a thing. So how do you strengthen your lower abs? The same way that you’re gonna strengthen your upper abs.  Best way to do that is to start with some basic stability exercises. 

So those would consist of things like bird dogs, or isometric planks, or hollow core holds. You kinda wanna isometrically contract your abs so you can actually feel them. You want to draw that connection. I’ve made some other videos about how do we feel our abs, a quick recap would be to make yourself cough, and that kind of brace out with that.

You can strengthen your abs by simply bracing your abs while doing strength training exercises. So full compound movements like squats, overhead presses, deadlifts. Those are all gonna really strengthen your core. Nice and strong now to see the abdominals, which most people will confuse with strengthening the abdominals. Our body fat is gonna have to be at a certain percentage for most men, you have to be well under 15% body fat. And for most women you’re gonna need to be below 22% body fat to start seeing them. 

Those numbers can vary widely within those ranges. For some men, they have to get all the way down to like 7% body fat to see their abdominals. But some men can see it as high as almost double at 14%. So there is really a wide range based on your body style, kind of aesthetically how you are put together. So that kind of covers the abs. Main moral of the story is they’re all gonna contract. If you want to see them, it’s going to be more based off nutrition. A good way to start to strengthen them. If you’re a beginner would be through some isometric core, exercises like bird dogs, or hollow core holds or planks, more kind of really like intense, building exercises would be like a Roman chair situp or a leg raise, or really good ones to strengthen the entire abs to actually give them that brick look appearance. 

So that covers up for the abs. Now let’s talk about the posture. So when you strengthen your core, you’re automatically going to get better posture because we go from, weak core kind of hunch down here, stronger core up tall chest. A good way to get posture is to practice it all the time, because we are unfortunately at a disadvantage where we’re on our cellphones all day, or we’re at our computer, or we’re driving at work and we’re stuck forward like this.

So to really strengthen that posture, you’re gonna really want to combat that exercises like the prone cobra or bruegger’s. I made a video on that a while ago, are really going to strengthen posture because most people have the common posture deviation of forward shoulder, which is tight pecs here, rounded shoulder here, and then weak, mid back muscles there. So that’s what causes this. 

So we wanna strengthen the back muscles, stretch out the chest, and that will automatically get you out of that forward shoulder positioning. Good things for posture would simply be to think top of the head to the tailbone, staying straight, lifting our chest, letting our heart be open. There’s a variety of different exercises you could do for that, but they’re mostly gonna consist of stretching out the chest, strengthening the back muscles. So that is how you can fix your posture, strengthen your core. That covers it. There is a lot more I can get into with posture specific. I really only covered the upper body posture in this video. I can make another one and cover lower body posture at another time. But for today, that is all hope you found value in this video. If you did give me a thumbs up for like, if you loved it, give me a heart. Drop any other questions you have in the comments below and as always, please, please, please stay strong.