How to Grow Your Abdominal Muscles
What is the Best Way to Grow Your Abdominal Muscles?
The abdominal muscles are just like any other muscle group in your entire body. The biggest difference would be their muscle fiber make up that is mostly slow-twitch muscle fibers as opposed to mostly fast-twitch muscle fibers. This means similar to other endurance slow-twitch muscle fiber muscle groups (such as abs and forearms) they grow at a slower rate than the powerful fast-twitch muscle groups (cheats, quad, and glutes). Albeit slower they will grow through the same methods of hypertrophy as any other muscle group.
Understanding the Abdominal Muscle
To grow the muscles you must understand how they perform and what they are. The abdominal muscles are made up of 4 different muscle groups the External Oblique, Internal Oblique, Rectus Abdominis, and Transversus Abdominis.
Each muscle group is responsible for a different movement:
External Oblique and Internal Oblique
The primary function of this muscle group twists and turns your body. The external and internal oblique work in conjunction of each other, when one the right external oblique and left internal oblique contract you torso will twist to the left.
This is the deepest muscle layer not seen from the outside of the body. They are used to stabilize your trunk and contain the organs.
This is the "6-pack" muscle group of your abs. The main function of the rectus abdominis is to pull the rib cage and the pelvis together.
Abdominal Muscle Movements
In order to grow your abdominal muscles you must focus on the strengthening the movement patterns for each of the muscle groups. Similar to growing your bicep you would want to do the full range movement of stretching the bicep and contracting the bicep against resistance, you will want to do the same for your abdominals. To work the abdominal muscles you will need to stabilize, twist, and contract these muscles through the full range of movement.
Muscle Hypertrophy
In order to grow your abdominal muscles you will need to perform muscle hypertrophy to increase their size. This can be done through Sarcoplasmic and Myofibrillar Hypertrophy. For a muscle article on this click here. This will mean progressive increasing loads and increasing the resistance to the different movements to challenge the muscle. Without adding resistance, it would be similar to only doing push-ups to grow your chest muscles. While this would work eventually you will need to challenge those muscles with greater resistance.
Growing Muscle vs. Having a 6-Pack
Growing abdominal muscles is different than having a 6-pack. Having a 6-Pack is a combination of muscle growth and reducing the fat on top of your abdominals. With the main focus on reducing fat and less on building up the muscle group. Growing abdominal muscles will increase your core circumference, therefore if your going is to have a "slim waist 6-pack" than you should spend more time reducing fat. As stated before, abdominal muscles are one of the more difficult muscle groups to grow due to the higher percentage of slow twitch muscles, therefore do not ignore them because you don't want a thick waist.
Growing your Abdominal Muscles
Abdominal muscles grow like any other muscle. If your goal is to grow them treat them like any other muscle group and train them with more challenging resistance to increase muscle size.
Abdominal Muscle Growth
In order to grow your abdominal muscles you will need to perform muscle hypertrophy to increase their size.
