For Tight Abs, It's Quality That Counts

Having trouble developing your abs? To develop tight abs, focus on isolating them fully by using a very short range of motion, but very high intensity, during your abdominal exercises.

With ab training, most people have the tendency to unintentionally use other muscles, most notably the hip flexors, to aid in completing the exercises. This takes a great deal of stress off of the abdominal muscles themselves, which, of course, defeats the purpose of ab training.

Three main reasons why most people fail to sufficiently isolate their abs and train them properly:

1. They simply don't recognize that the correct way to train abs is by squeezing them together very hard in an accordion-type manner rather than by bending excessively at the waist (which is a "waste" of time, forgive the pun).

2. They take the easy way out. It's a lot more difficult to actually contract the abdominal muscles together hard than it is to bounce up and down like a jack-hammer.

3. They are more concerned with how many reps they do than with how intense each rep is. You see it all the time--people in the gym doing sets of 50, 100, even 200 or more crunches.

Total nonsense. If you're really working your abs intensely, a set of 12-15 reps should leave your midsection burning.

Working your abs within a fairly limited range of motion helps combat all of these detrimental tendencies.

When you do Crunches or Reverse Crunches, for instance, you want to focus intently on contracting the abs and really squeezing them together hard, but your body should only actually move about 4-6 inches.

And once you Crunch up hard, don't simply release on the way back down—make the negative portion of the movement work for you as well by maintaining tension in your abs throughout the full range. Give it a try and firm up that midsection intelligently.