If you are looking to have powerful, sexy abs, then you have come to the right place for that information. To achieve a six pack or flat stomach you will have to do more than just crunches. You will have to do cardio exercises involving your core, like running, skipping, playing a sport, or something of your choice. And you will have to eat a healthy diet.

Here are some great tips to achieve a strong powerful sexy core to help you with all your other exercises too. You will be able to jump higher, run faster, lift more weight in all your exercises, and on top of that you will look and feel great.

Abdominal Tips:

1. When doing and abdominal exercise you must focus on crunching the abs together. So concentrate on moving your belly button in a line towards chest bone. You will feel a tight squeeze in your abs, but be careful at first, as you can put the muscle into spasm if you aren't used to it. This is how the abdominals work they crunch, not curl like a traditional sit-up.

2. Take deep breathes and drink cold water in between exercises to help reduce lactic acid build up, and to increase energy.

Abdominal Exercises and Tips:


Dynamic Core Stretch:

Stand up straight with your arms above your head go on your toes and reach up and then lean back sticking your pelvis out you will feel your lower abs tighten. Now come back forward with your arms still over your head and lean forward with your hips without bending your back. Try twisting your body around, but keep your body erect and stretched out, not slouching.

Hanging Leg raises:

This is an advanced exercise that involves more than just the abs, but is a great compound exercise that helps connect the abs with the hip flexors, which is useful for running, kicking, and jumping. So basically hang from a bar, if this is to hard, then use the leg raise stand. Now lift using your hips and pelvis first than lift you legs up, touch the bar if you can. And remember to crunch your abs.

Scissor Crunches:

This is a great total abdominal exercise that will target the entire abs, including the oblique muscles if you put a twist in it, just like with most core exercises. OK, for this one lie on the floor on your back with your legs stretched out and your arms stretched behind your head. Now raise your legs and arms at the same time, bring them up and towards each other as close as you can while focusing on crunching the abs together. For more power, raise you legs and arms together as fast as possible into a crunch position, then lower your legs and arms with control as soon as they are an inch off the ground power them back up, continue until your most powerful rep then stop and rest.

The Bridge/Plank:

Something that most people don't know is that the abs are more than what you see on the outside, for example a 6 or 8 pack abs. There is also an entire abdominal wall that can be argued is more important to strength than the visual abs. The reason for this is because the interior core protects your vital organs for impact damage. This is why know matter the look of your abs, like a boxer for example, if he/she gets hit hard enough in the mid-section they will bleed from the mouth and/or cause serious internal organ damage, bottom line it's nasty. So to help protect your insides more, add this to your core routine. And you can do this from different angles, reverse (chest facing up) and on the side too.

Here's how it works:

Go into a push-up position on the floor; now bend your arms one at a time onto your forearms, after a few seconds you should start to feel you abs tighten to support your body, this is actually strengthening the inner core, try to hold it for at least 30-60 seconds, or work you way up to that. For more of a challenge move your arms further in front of you increasing the stretch in your abs, and back and more resistance. Good Luck!!

Weight training is vital to your sports performance, because if you are matched with someone in skill, then it will take speed, power, and strength to defeat your opponent on the court, field or in the ring.

Some athletes even coaches and trainers get confused with the deference between,bodybuilding or muscle building vs. weight training for strength and power for specific sports.

For example having huge muscular legs does NOT mean you can jump very high, or run very fast; increased jumping ability comes from being able to lift with speed.

If the weight continues to increase and the speed stays the same, power and vertical jumping ability will increase only if you maintain your body weight.

When using weight lifting for sports the main goal is to improve and strengthen movements in your sport.
For example: If you want to run faster or jump higher, you need to perform compound exercises under resistance to mimic the same movement.

So if you do dead lifts, squats, power cleans,
snatches, clean and jerk, vertical jumps, depth jumps, lunges, calve raises, you will help target and strengthen the jumping muscles in you legs and some in your upper body.

Also when doing the specific movement or exercise don't go past to point where the speed and power of the lift is reduced, wait till you are fully rested, and increase the weight and do the same, on your last set you can do multiple sets with minimal rest in between with the heaviest weight for at least 3-5 reps, or do an all out total reps for more muscles growth and absolute power or strength.

Next time you do these exercises try for an extra rep or 2 on you all out max set(s) or multiple power sets.
Record your workouts for total weight lifted and the amount of time you take to rest and complete a series of exercises or sets.

Specific Compound Exercises for Sports in General:

1. Bench Press: You may think this exercise targets only the chest, but when done correctly should be using you whole body to help stabilize and lift the weight, this includes feet position, should position, is your back arched or not?, and your elbow alignment, as well as grip placement, and path of your movement, and if you are bringing the bar to you nipple line or not, all these small things can make the difference of you benching 300lbs or not.

2. Squat: Again the squat targets most of your body, not just your legs. There are many variations of the squat.

For example, there is the traditional low or high squats, hack squats or 1/4 squats, scissor squats, sumo squats, squats with the weight extended above your head with increase you back strength and power, but use less weight to start.
 

Olympic weight lifting technique is vital for proper form to achieve your full potential. There are two main Olympic lifts called the Clean and Jerk and the Snatch. For most people they will find the clean and jerk the easiest to learn out of the two, BUT the snatch is the most athletic movement in sports.

Whether you want to lift more weight or get stronger, knowing how power is developed in your body is key to getting stronger and more powerful in your sport, activity or weight training itself.

There are 5 key components to developing mega power:

1. Starting Acceleration
2. Progressive Acceleration
3. Power Output
4. Stability
5. Re-coordination

The First stage to power development is:

1. Starting Acceleration:

This is the initial burst of power in a movement, when you start from a dead stop and explode with power, the first few inches is where the starting Acceleration is developed. It will help your mind and body to learn to contract your muscles and release explosive power instantly.

For Example when doing heavier squats, or if you want to jump higher, you must practice starting acceleration.

Do this by sitting in a chair or on a box, in a position to explode back up, let your muscles relax, then spring up as fast as possible, for at least the first few inches. The focus is on the intial contraction and liftoff.

After practicing without weight you can add about 35% of your max squat, and do the same thing with the weight.

NOTE: It's a similar effect as the one-inch punch, start at a dead stop, and explode an inch with your fist, this is an example of what Bruce Lee did to help develop impressive strength, power and speed in his punch.

The Second Stage of Power Development is:

2. Progressive Acceleration:

This is where you train your body to be able to work at full power, speed and strength at various angles in a specific movement.

There are a couple ways to train for progressive acceleration, you can train for speed and strength. You should do both.

The purpose of Progressive Acceleration is to maintain or speed up as you rise in your movement (ex. squat), not decrease in speed. And you want to use full strength throughout the movement as well.

A great way to increase your progressive acceleration speed is by using a pool, for example when you are touching the bottom of the pool with your feet, squat down and spring back up off the bottom, you will notice that you are very light in the water, and you actually speed up as you rise, this teachs your mind and body to speed up the contraction of your muscles, even with little to no-resistance.

Another form of progressive acceleration performed by sprinters is running down a hill, this forces your legs to move faster than normal, and increase your muscle contraction and limb speed.

When developing more progressive acceleration strength you can try pushing against an unmovable object with all your force, as various angles, so for a bench press you can lock out the bar right at chest level and push your hardest for at least 10 seconds, then rest a couple minutes and lock the bar at mid level and do the same, then lock the bar at peak level and finish. (Important Note: If you feel you are not pushing your hardest stop and rest.) Progressive acceleration can be added to your routine 1-2 times a week.

The third stage to power development is:

3. Power Output

This is where you will have to really keep track and record your numbers, you want to basically do as much work in as little time as possible at top speed.

For example, "person A" who lifts 200lbs for 4 reps in 15 seconds is about twice as powerful than "person B" who lifts 200lbs for 4 reps in 30 seconds. Your goal is to increase weight lifted, increase speed, or decrease time. Numbers don't lie, if you work the numbers you will be in control of your progress and improvement.

The Forth Stage of Power Development is:

4. Stability

Having strong stability muscles is important, it's like making sure the wheels on you car are aligned correctly to make sure you can go at top speed with no problems.

Because you are performing weight lifting and resistance training, your stability muscles are going to be worked and become strong naturally, but if you feel you need to do more, then add some stability exercises to your routine, like standing on one leg or using a stability ball for balancing on or while lifting too.

The last stage to power development is:

5. Re-coordination:

This is at the end of your workout after the heavy training or weights. You basically want to practice the main functional movements that you may want to improve.

For example if you want to throw harder punches, then go hit the bag, or if you want to jump higher go practice your jumping technique. But only do about 5 - 10 good reps.

This will program your mind and body to remember the last movements done, so you will also subconsciously improve as well.

Final notes:

When developing your power, you can do all 5 stages in one workout or you can spread them out over your week of training, doing one stage per workout.

If you use the power development stages you will continue to get stronger and more powerful, because remember numbers don't lie.

Now with this information you are well ahead of most weight lifters, athletes, coaches, and even trainers, so if someone doesn't know the stages of power development then they don't really know power!