- I'd love to talk about abdominal or rather core work. - Sure. - Another thing that I love in the Naked Warrior are the abdominal exercises. I must tell you, after years of doing some crunches here and there and different, you know, for whatever this class or that class are trying to, I never really cared about having my abs defined for its own sake.

One should probably be able to at least contract their abs. Okay, it's the level of- - We assess them by punching. - Right, right, right, exactly. But there's some wonderful exercises in there about learning to brace the entire body and some, dare I say, some rather unorthodox ways of assessing stability at the level of the core.

I'm thinking about the plank where somebody tries to either kick you over or push you over. This might sound violent. This is not where you start, folks. - It's kind and gentle. - But I never thought I could do like hanging pikes, for instance. And like now pikes are a standard part of my weekly routine.

I love doing five sets of five of hanging pikes. - Great, great. - And I will tell anyone that decides to go down this path that when I first tried to do a pike, I failed miserably. I tried an L-sit, failed miserably. Tried the, you know, hanging from the bar and just getting into a chair position and could just barely hold that.

The progressions are what matter, right? Slow progression and patience. Now five sets of five pikes, trivial for me. But when I, I just want to emphasize that when I started, I was far, far away from that. And it's the progressions in the book that really helped me and I've maintained that pike ability.

So thank you for that. And I say, not to necessarily to highlight what I can do, but that to highlight what I do believe most anybody can do. If you put the work in. - If they put a lot of attention in. So midsection training is one of the most misunderstood and messed up areas of physical culture.

There's a thousand different exercises and people are going to get a variety, this many reps. That's not the point. The point really is tension and attention. So those are the two things. And ideally your best first step is really learning abdominal tension through something like a Zurcher squat or double kettlebell front squat, where the load distribution is such that it forces reflexive stabilization.

And you feel, oh, that's what tight abs feel like. And getting somebody just weak in a plank, it's hopeless. It's absolutely not going to help. It's not. There are ways of building up to it, yes, by rolling in the back and so on. So, but if you don't have that option, or if you choose not to exercise it, you have to be extremely attentive to the details of what's going on within your abdomen.

So you need to learn things like, for example, you need to learn to contract the pelvic diaphragm, pull your butt up. Because you're trying to constrain the intra-abdominal pressure. Then you need to learn how to direct attention to the different parts of your abdomen, almost like a bodybuilder, but really not quite, more like a gymnast.

There is this argument about, in the strength world, about internal focus, external focus, and cueing. And the agreement is in motor learning, well, external focus cueing is so much better than focusing on whatever happens within the individual muscle. It may be true in the beginning, and it may be true outside of the strength game, but any top strength athlete that you will meet, they have their own internal cues how they do something.

Later on, they may forget them, it despires them, but they know how to, this is how I engage the lat in the bench press. George Halbert, bench press world record holder, famously said, "It took him many years "to finally understand how the triceps "is used in the bench press, many years." So there is a lot of internal component, and for the abs, very, very much.

So you have to learn how to very much direct your attention there. To get high tension, you have to keep the reps low. Like you said, five sets of five, perfect. High reps are not necessary. You're not gonna burn off fat by doing more reps, you're just gonna irritate your back, that's all you're gonna do, nothing else.

So you treat your ab training very much like a strength event. And if you do that, you're gonna get those results. And finally, the final detail is you need to use that intra-abdominal pressure as your friend. Because in lifting, like a deadlift or a squat or something, the intra-abdominal pressure helps you, it supports you.

When you're doing abdominal work, you work against that intra-abdominal pressure. You just create that pressure and contract against it. This is something called internal isometrics. So it's kind of interesting, it's just a combination of classic strength work with very internalized, kind of almost like a martial arts approach to it.

Then you need to learn also how to obviously use your abs in the lifts, in lifting. And once you do, and this is the beauty, you don't really have to train your abs anymore. So Franco Colombo, for example, great example, in addition to winning, you know, being super strong and winning Mr.

Olympia, he won the best abs. He didn't train abs. He said, he told me, "I hate ab training." He just would stay tight whenever he did his heavy lifts. And this is pretty much what happens. When you reach a certain level of strength and a certain level of awareness, simply staying tight during your strength work and also employing power breathing, which is very important, you're going to be able to get as strong as you need in the abs and get your six pack or whatever, provided, you know, you don't eat the Twinkies.

So how do you pressurize the... In fact, may I show an abdominal exercise right now that is just sitting at this table that's also going to teach you how, teach your audience how to properly pressurize for lifting. So normally it's better done standing. So, and it's not for people with high blood pressure or heart concerns, you know, check with your doctor if that's the situation.

So you take a normal breath in your abdomen and you pull up your butt pretty much. Like imagine you have to go to the restroom and you're trying to, you can't quite, you know, it's far away, you're trying to stop yourself. And then you put your tongue between your teeth and you start (inhales and exhales) and you start hissing.

And you do this in this ratcheting kind of manner. So (inhales and exhales) try to keep all the pressure out of your head, out of your neck, direct all the pressure, all this pressure is just to really staying below. And so this type of hissing, (inhales and exhales) you will notice that very rapidly you're going to contract everything around your waist.

So everything around your waist is going to contract and you're going to strain your abdomen. You're also going to start learn how to properly, how to properly stabilize yourself under heavy weights. The difference between using this technique for lifting and for just training the abs, when you're training the abs there's going to be some spinal flexion, not a whole lot.

You don't want to do a lot of that. There's going to be some spinal flexion. When you're doing that under a heavy barbell squat, you're maintaining your spine is neutral. It's like your body stays a cylinder and you're going to hold your breath pretty much. But the idea is the same.

So it's like, so the Valsalva maneuver, one Russian coach called it, it's an exhalation that didn't happen, okay? Because people don't know how to hold their breath properly. They just, and then eyes are bulging out where there's no stability right here. So first of all, you got to inhale low.

And how do you do that? If you watch top lifters, how they do that, they will do it through pursed lips. You can also do it through the nose, but you cannot do through big wide open mouth. So I'll show you why. So if you, you can, your folks can try it at home.

So if you put your hand on your stomach and trying to do an abdominal breath, it doesn't go very well. Now, for contrast, pinch off one nostril, take an abdominal breath, or you can do that through pursed lips. Try it again. So you see- - More resistance. - More resistance.

And again, you're engaging the diaphragm instead of just your thorax right there. So you take that breath into your abdomen in like through a small opening through your nose or through your pursed lips, you draw it in right there. And then, you know, down below, you pull it up.

And then after that, it's that exhalation that didn't happen. Do you see? - I see. So I'm familiar with sort of bracing my abs. What I've not done before is the resisting going to the bathroom thing that you mentioned, the pulling up of the butt. And then, so you're creating compression from the bottom and from the top.

- And also from all around, that happens reflexively as well. - I see. So that's the position to get in to before, say, like a hard Zurcher squat or something like that. - Absolutely. And if you're doing that for an exercise that's long in duration, you know, if you don't wanna be holding your breath too long, then we have an expression that comes from one of the karate styles, breathing behind the shield.

So right now I can speak to you, but I'm still just as tight. So you see what you're doing. So the way we test it at our, the way we teach it at our workshops is you lie on the ground. I tell you to tense up. Then I'm gonna stand on your stomach.

I'm gonna have you sing a song. And you're gonna have to learn to properly maintain that pressure while still continuing to breathe. So you're able to stabilize your spine, but you're not going to pass out from maintaining that by holding your breath for a period of time. And then finally, what you gotta learn to do is you gotta learn to match the breath with the force.

So synchronize, synchronize when you're punching, when you're throwing, when you're lifting, you have to learn how to match that contraction, the timing of the abdominal contraction and the pressurization, sometimes exhalation, sometimes just pretending to with the effort. Once you learn how to match the breath with the force, it's like magic.

And what people don't realize is not just purely mechanical. Mechanically, yes, of course it works. You know, Stu explained this so well about the stiffness of the structure, the analogy of the bicycle frame. It's the same thing. You're getting an expensive bicycle frame when you have strong abs, as opposed to the cheap one that rattles and wiggles.

But there's also something that it's never spoken about in the West for some reason. The Soviets studied that decades ago. There's something they called the pneumo, mathematic reflex, pneumo is P-N-E-U-M-O, so air. So there are barrier receptors, receptors for sensors for pressure inside your abdominal cavity and thoracic cavity.

So whenever these receptors are stimulated, what they do is they automatically increase the sensitivity about alpha motor neurons. So what it really means to the audience is this. If you imagine your brain is the music player and imagine your muscle is a speaker, the amount of intra-abdominal pressure is your volume control.

So by increasing that pressure, you're increasing the strength, but by releasing that intra-abdominal pressure, you relax the muscle. So that's why in stretching, as I mentioned before, you can't be sitting in a half split and groaning. No, you need to release. If you release that passive breath, again, your muscles are going to relax.

So controlling your breath is very much, as it's known in martial arts, it's very much synonymous with controlling your body and your mind very often. - Fantastic. When one throws a punch, is it true that exhaling is actually providing additional power or? - No question about it. - Okay.

- Yeah, it's been measured. It's been measured on fighters. It's also been measured in lifting as well. There was a study that was done in the West even when screaming increases strength significantly. And again, this is not just a psychological component. I mean, there may be some psychological component to that, but again, there's this very distinct increase of strength through that reflex.

And it's very easy for the listeners to test that, get a dynamometer, hand gripper, and just test yourself on that. And just see, test it out with different breathing patterns and just see what happens. And whenever this idiotic practice at some gyms, oh, you can't grunt right here. And it's just, well, I guess you can be strong here.

And yeah, of course, if you're doing this on purpose, you're walking in with the bros and you're just trying to just to make noise to attract attention, that's wrong. But strength is a noisy endeavor. So there may be some hissing. There may be some grunting. It's just absolutely unavoidable.

And if you're trying to be quiet and if you're trying to be a lady or a gentleman, well, maybe it's for somewhere else, not for the gym. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music)