Fix Your Bubble Gut!

I’m going to be teaching you guys some simple tricks to help you tighten up your core. Just like any other part of your body, if you don’t train those muscles on a consistent basis, they start to get a little soft. I’m sure many of you have had weeks where you weren’t able to make it to the gym, or weren’t able to target all your muscles properly. Let’s say you had to skip your arm day, then all of a sudden when you flex your bicep, you touch it and it feels kind of soft. You freak out, go to the gym, smash your arms as hard as you can, and then you’re back to normal. Sound familiar? It’s like a sickness, especially for us males.

What actually happened is the muscles just started to get a bit relaxed because they haven’t been training. Your body basically is always going to say to itself, if it’s not using something, why does it have to keep focused on it, or why does that muscle have to stay strong and hard and big? If you’re not using those muscles, I wouldn’t say they wither away, but they tend to get a little bit weaker because there’s no force being called upon them to do otherwise.

Why Isn’t My Core Tight & Hard Like The Rest Of My Body?

Well, the same goes for the core, and unfortunately the majority of us make sure we go to the gym every single week to hit legs, arm, chest, all the main muscle groups, but the core can sometimes be lagging. Aside from that, a lot of us sit down ALL day long, and from sitting down in our chairs we just kind of let it all hang out. We normally hunch over and the entire core area tends to get relaxed A LOT. Then as you walk around during the day, I doubt the majority of you are keeping it nice and tight, again you’re likely just letting it all hang out or maybe even pushing it out. I don’t know exactly what is happening, but there’s a problem there.

Now I have talked about this before and how you can utilize exercises like the Stomach Vacuum in order to work the transverse abdominis to try to help pull everything in nice and tight. However, doing stomach vacuums a few days a week, for a lot of you, isn’t going to be enough. If you’ve forgotten what a stomach vacuum is, it’s basically when you breathe all the air out of your system, suck in your stomach, and hold it for as long as you can, repeating that for sets and reps.

How Can I Rectify This?

What I want you to start doing is making mental checks throughout the day to pull in your core, and keep it tight. I guarantee you, if you start doing this every single day, you’re going to start to see a change in not only your waist size, but also in the shape of your actual core. The abdominal muscles, the muscles throughout your core including your obliques and serratus, the entire area will start to get tighter and tighter and the muscles will begin to look better and better because you’re basically forcing them to, by keeping them tensed.

Now I’m not saying you have to walk around flexing your core so hard that it looks like you’re about to poop your pants… that’s not what we’re trying to do. However, let’s say you’re at your desk, at work, and you’re typing on your computer. Instead of being hunched over, make sure you sit up straight, and flex your core so you get a nice tense going on so you can feel the muscles activating. As you’re walking around, whether it’s outside, at your house or at the mall, wherever you’re going, instead of walking around loose, just get a nice tensed core going on and feel those muscles activating so that the muscles themselves are getting worked throughout the day.

I’m telling you, this is going to make a major difference. At first, it might feel kind of difficult because the muscles are weak and aren’t used to being tensed this way, but as you start doing it every single day it will almost become second nature. What I started to realise is that when I was in high school in my early teens, weighing about 130lbs soaking wet, I thought I was huge. I would walk around sticking my chest out and flexing my abs whether I had a t-shirt on or off. But because I was doing that all the time, it kept my core trimmed and tight, it really does work.

At What Other Times Should I Focus On Keeping Everything Tight?

Another thing is if you’re sitting in your car driving, instead of trying to be cool driving with one hand and leaning back in your seat with your core all jumbled up, try sitting up straight with two hands on the wheel. This will put you in a prime position to flex your abs which you can hold while driving. Again, if you start doing that a lot it will become second nature and you’ll do it all the time.

In terms of how long you should be doing this for, or how many sets and reps, there really aren’t specific numbers to follow. You’re basically going to hold it for as long as you can, then when you start to get tired you can relax and start flexing again when you’re ready. It should feel like something you do all day, rather than something you do only when you wake up or only before you go to bed.

Speaking of going to bed, another thing I like to do when I’m laying down (whether I’m watching TV or playing on my phone or whatever), is instead of just lying there and letting it all hang out, I’ll slightly tense my core. It just becomes something you do without thinking about it and it feels GREAT. Now there are a couple of different ways to flex your core, and there’s a specific way I want you to be flexing yours.

How Should I Flex My Core?

Regular core is stage one, where you basically just let it hang out and there’s absolutely no tension in the core. Obviously if your abs are blocky enough (like mine) you can still see their outline, but there’s no flexion going on. You can flex just the middle area, and you can walk around and just keep that flexed as well. This means mainly focusing on flexing the middle abs, the rectus abdominis, not focusing on the obliques much or at all. Unfortunately, the only way you can really maximize this flex and hold it is if you’re standing. As soon as you start to sit down you’ll quickly notice this doesn’t really work well and you don’t feel it as hard.

The way you should flex your core the majority of the time is basically the entire area at once. You should focus on more than just the rectus abdominis, and when you do this flex you’ll notice it starts to pull in all the sides. Now I know a lot of you will be wondering how you are supposed to tell the difference between flexing this way or that way, if you can’t even flex your core to begin with. I suggest you simply start off small. Flex your core to the point where you start to feel tension in the sides, and it’s going to be a gradual thing to build a mind-muscle connection, which is the main reason why this works. A lot of you won’t even have the mind-muscle connection yet to even flex your core, and do what I am talking about. The only way you can get there is by practising.

Conclusion

What I want you to do is take out your phone and set an alarm labelled ‘Flex Core’ to go off every hour. That will give you a reminder every hour to try and tense your core up, and I guarantee you even after a week, you’ll see a huge difference in not only how your core is starting to look (e.g. tighter), but your mind-muscle connection will go from about 0-100 in no time.