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Originally Posted by McDuffie
You cannot train lower abs alone.
According to Dr. Fred Hatfield, PhD:
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It's a myth that you can "isolate" the upper from the lower abs -- electromyographic studies show that the minute you apply resistance, both your upper and lower abdominals kick into action together
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If you look at the abdominal muscle's insertion and origin, it's easy to see why this is so.
Do crunches, you work the upper and lower abs; do leg raises, you work the upper and lower abs.
It's called non-contiguous innervation. |
I know this is an old post, but I cannot have erroneous information out there with my name on it. Let me tell you how I got to the point that I would say this:
1) I started working out in the early 1980s. The mytholology then and now was that muscles could be shaped by doing different exercises. In other words, certain exercises will give you thick lats, and certain others will give you wide lats. I believed these myths because I had no real reason not to.
2) As I became more educated about kinesiology and biomechanics, I learned that this not so. Muscles cannot be shaped. This mythology can be directly traced to the writings of one man: Bill Reynolds, former editor of Muscle and Fitness Magazine.
3) The hypothesis of muscle shaping says that lifting in certain ways, or doing certain exercises will work parts of a muscle. Pec flyes work the 'inner part' of the chest, closest to the sternum; bench presses work the 'outer' part of the chest. This is not possible. When you observe the nervous system, you see that the nerves stimulate muscle cells throughout the muscle. As I mentioned above, it's noncontinguous innervation. Do a google search of that phrase for a better explanation than I can provide here.
4) About a month after I made the above post, I was reading my textbook in final preparation for my test and I found that I was wrong. Here is a quote from the textbook:
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From physiology it is known that when a muscle contracts, the entire muscle undergoes contraction. This is true of the abdominal muscles; however, because the rectus abdominis is relatively long, one end is stabilized when it contracts in order to produce movement in the other end. For example, when doing a sit-up or crunch, the pelvic girdle is held in place firmly via contraction of the hip joint muscles so that the shoulders will rise toward the feet. Because of this, you experience shortening mainly of the upper fibers of the rectus abdominis. The lower fibers do not undergo the same amount of shortening. For the most part it remains under isometric contraction and, as result, you get development mainly of the upper fibers.
To produce shortening of the rectus abdominis in the lower fibers of the abdomen, it is necessary to do exercises such as the reverse sit-up (reverse crunch) or hanging leg raises. In these exercises the pelvic girdle is in motion while the chest and shoulders are stabilized. The upper fibers of the abdominal muscles remain isometrically tensed.
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The man I quote in my previous post, Dr. Fred Hatfield, contributed to the textbook and edited the final version. It's not that Hatfield was wrong about upper and lower abs, it's that I didn't read the rest of the article.
So
I was wrong. There is only one other muscle that can be
somewhat shaped: the pectoralis majoris (i.e. chest). The reason why is that the pec is actually two muscles in one, with a common insertion point. There is the clavicular pectoral (upper) and the sternal (lower) pectoral. The reason that the pec can be
somewhat shaped is that the upper and lower pecs are innervated by two different nerves. Both of these nerves fire when you do pec movements, but incline bench presses will stimulate the upper pec more than the lower pec and flat or inverted bench presses will do the opposite.
Will you ever notice a difference? Probably not. If you utterly abandoned flat benching and only did incline benching, perhaps years later, you might notice that your pecs are more developed on the top than in the main belly of the muscle. It's a 60/40 thing, or maybe even 55/45. 55 to 60% of the power in flat benching comes from the lower pecs and 55 to 60% of the power in incline bench pressing comes from the upper pecs.
Can you work your inner pecs? No
Can you do concentration curls to increase your biecps 'peak'? Absolutely not.
Ok, thank you for bearing with me. I wanted to correct that information.
McD