While a six-pack stomach may be the most conventional benchmark of athletic beauty, functional abdominal strength goes deeper and is far more important than vanity. A strong core improves your posture and reduces the likelihood of lower back pain. [...]]]> Note: This is a guest post from Ryan Murdock and Adam Steer, the BodyweightCoach.com experts.

While a six-pack stomach may be the most conventional benchmark of athletic beauty, functional abdominal strength goes deeper and is far more important than vanity. A strong core improves your posture and reduces the likelihood of lower back pain. It plays a stabilizing role in virtually every movement you do—from carrying the groceries or bending down to tie your shoes to throwing a ball or pulling a heavy lift. It is also the source of power generation in most athletic activities.

We’re going to build a killer core with bodyweight exercise, in as little as 12-minutes per session.

How?

By training in 6 degrees of freedom.

Training in 6-Degrees of Freedom

What the heck does that mean?

It’s a term we took from aviation, because it most accurately describes how your body moves through space.

We don’t move robotically through one plane at a time. Human movement is a complex weave through different planes and on different axes. If we take the three axes of conventional movement descriptions, we can think about moving both along and around those axes in order to take advantage of our true movement potential.

• Heaving: moving up and down

• Swaying: moving right and left

• Surging: moving forward and backward

• Pitching: bending forward and backward

• Yawing: twisting right and left

• Rolling: bending or tilting right and left

The bottom line?

Training in 6-Degrees of Freedom will kick your butt faster than any other method.

Why does that matter? It means you’ll be finished training sooner. Training in 6-Degrees will also ensure that your body remains balanced. You won’t waste time dealing with overuse injuries, or overcompensations created by doing the same repetitive movements in the same planes day after day.

That’s a brief primer on the theory. Let’s get to the program.

Circular Strength Training (CST) Bodyweight Glide Workout Program

This program is designed to shred your core in as little as 12-minutes per day using only bodyweight exercise.

The movements were designed to be done with those little plastic glide discs you’ve seen on TV. But the good news is you don’t need the discs. Socks, RMAX ultimate grappling shoes, and squares of felt all work on hardwood floors. Disposable paper plates work great on carpet. If you’re on a business trip and staying in hotels, tear a page out of one of the free glossy magazines in the desk drawer, or put the plastic laundry bag from the closet on your feet. Anything that will allow your feet to slide on the floor will work.

The Knee-In: Heaving Component

The V-Up: Pitching Component

The Side Knee-In: Yawing Component

The Mountain Climber: Surging Component

The Side Plank Knee-In: Rolling Component

The Tadpole: Swaying Component

Remember, keep your shoulders packed, rotate your elbow pits forward, maintain good crown to coccyx spinal alignment, and activate your core with a hard exhale on every rep. These movements should be core driven.

You now have all 6 CST Bodyweight Glide movements, one for each of the 6-Degrees of Freedom:

• Heaving: Knee-in
• Pitching: V-up
• Yawing: Side knee-in
• Surging: Mountain climber
• Rolling: Side plank knee-in
• Swaying: Tadpole

Great! Now what do you do with them?

Shredding Your Core in 12-Minutes Per Day

There are a number of ways we could approach it, and it really depends on your goals. Think of the individual movements as being tools on the tactical level — they’re the maneuvers we use to carry out our plan, but the plan itself — in this case our training protocol — is decided at the strategic level.

For the purposes of this series, I’m going to suggest one protocol for readers who would like to put this program to immediate use. Our hypothetical client in this case is someone who travels frequently for business, who has no access to equipment, little free time, and whose primary goal is to develop core strength through all degrees of freedom while increasing their cardiovascular capacity and losing excess weight.

Perform each exercise for 30-seconds. When those 30 seconds are up, switch seamlessly into the next exercise and perform it for 30 seconds (don’t take breaks in between — that’s too easy!). Continue until you’ve done all 6 movements.

That’s one circuit. The full program consists of 3 circuits, with 1 minute rest between each circuit.

At first you’ll feel like you want to coast through the movements, to spread out your reps. Don’t do it. Your strategy should be to keep the fastest pace that you can manage while maintaining good technique. You want this to be intense. What’s the point of coasting along when you can squeeze every ounce from the time you’re spending?

Hints for Further Progress

If you work the program as planned, you’re going to progress and it will get easier. When that happens, you can do one of two things:

1. decrease the rest time between sets
2. OR increase the duration of the exercises.

Start by decreasing the one minute rest between sets. Ease that down to 30 seconds of rest, then to 15 seconds of rest. Your body will adapt by training itself to recover in less and less time.

Next, increase the duration that you perform each movement to 40 seconds (from our baseline of 30).

Finally, if you’re up for it you can remove the rest periods entirely so that you’re performing 3 back-to-back circuits nonstop. This has the added benefit of bringing your total workout time down to 9 minutes—allowing you to knock off early, or to add a fourth set.

You can do this CST Bodyweight Glide program 2 -4 times per week, or on the Moderate day of a 4×7 cycle.

So that’s it. How to shred your core in 12-minutes per day, in a balanced, health-first fashion. We’re glad you chose to come along for the ride.

Sincerely,

Ryan Murdock, Bodyweight Exercise Expert

P.S. For more unique bodyweight workouts like this one, visit Ryan and Adam’s sites: www.BodyweightExerciseRevolution.com for various bodyweight workout programs or www.Bodyweight-Blueprint.com for fat loss specific programs.

P.P.S. Both Ryan and Adam have an upcoming program called TAC-FIT Commando that I have had the pleasure of previewing. These guys have teamed up with my coach Scott Sonnon to create one of the most cutting-edge bodyweight training programs I’ve ever encountered. I have test-driven some parts of the program and will be using it as part of my regular routine when it’s released. Keep your eyes peeled because you’ll be hearing more about it in the coming weeks.

I just finished working with our graphic and PDF designers over at www.burnthefat.com to have this special report created. This is a PDF report about how to get six pack abs fast. My friend, Tom Venuto, needed to give an official answer since he gets so many questions about how to get [...]]]> **Download Below**

I just finished working with our graphic and PDF designers over at www.burnthefat.com to have this special report created. This is a PDF report about how to get six pack abs fast. My friend, Tom Venuto, needed to give an official answer since he gets so many questions about how to get six pack abs fast. So, to answer this question once and for all (probably not, but we’re hoping!), Tom wrote up this special report, and I had it turned into a PDF for you.

Tom Venuto - the fat loss coach

In case you don’t know Tom yet, he’s a wealth of fat loss knowledge, and he’s also a man who walks the talk.  He’s not only been a fitness trainer and fat loss coach for the past 20 years, he’s a champion natural bodybuilder (the one’s that still look like humans – not the massive behemoth’s that juice on steroids), and he’s been training nonstop for 25 years.  Tom has written hundreds of articles for websites and major magazines such as IRONMAN and Natural Bodybuilding and Fitness.  He’s also the author of the #1 best selling e-book, Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle.  Also, Tom just recently had a hardcover book published called The Body Fat Solution, and it will hit stores on January 9, 2009. (press release here)

Tom is one of the most respected experts because he’s never sold supplements, so you’re not going to hear about “magic weight loss pills” from him. Tom has never said that weight loss is easy so you won’t be hearing about any “magic solutions” or “rapid weight loss crash diets” either, because even if they do work, the results don’t last. What you will hear from Tom are the facts about fat loss and information on a simple program that virtually guarantees NATURAL and PERMANENT fat loss.

So, here is a brief introduction for the Six Pack Abs Revealed special report from Tom Venuto….

Download Your Copy Now

“After 18 years in the fitness business, “How do I get great abs” is still BY FAR the most frequently asked question I receive out of the over 30,000 emails that come into my office every month. No doubt it’s because abs are the one body part that most people are the most frustrated with.

Although their questions are often phrased differently and each person’s situation seems unique, my answer to “How do I get great abs” is almost always the same…and you’re about to hear it…”

Please download your copy by clicking on the spiral notebook image. Or, right click, and select “Save Link As…”

You can also click here to download your copy.

I’d like to offer you my review of this special report, so you know what you’re getting into.

I think Tom’s work stands head and shoulders above other fat loss guru’s out there. When Tom speaks, I listen. This little notebook about how to get six pack abs fast is chock-full of golden information that can help almost anyone finally get a six pack. Please keep in mind that Tom is a lifetime natural bodybuilder, and he will be the first to tell you that not everyone should be following a bodybuilding-style strength training routine.

There is a section of the PDF report entitled “My Championship-Winning Ab Workout Routine.” This is Tom’s personal ab training program that he uses to prepare for his bodybuilding competitions. I want to caution you that there are alternatives to this strength training routine for getting six pack abs. Isolation exercises such as crunches and situps are excellent for aesthetic goals in the case of stepping out on stage to be judged for appearance. However, they carry some health risks that you should be aware of.

Namely, isolation exercises actually train our holistically functional body to work in isolation – and that means movement and muscle imbalances, which always leads to injury. Done excessively over time, and you’re risking structural problems or worse.

A much healthier and safer alternative would be some of the exercises in the Core Strengthening Exercises video series I have here on JohnSifferman.com

Just do a search for these videos using the search box at the top.

Your Question of the Day is: how do you like the special report? I could use some critique for future PDF work!

To your health and success,

Fitness Professional and Wellness Warrior

P.S. Here is another download link for Six Pack Abs Revealed.

Download Six Pack Abs Revealed