[quote]winkel wrote:
Bill Roberts wrote:
I don’t know the answer to this, not currently following pro bb’ing, so it’s not a rhetorical question but actually asking you:
So, did this make a big difference to his abs? Or in his own particular case did his abs also look great before and at best are a little better now or is it uncertain if they even are?
My point, incidentally, wasn’t that I was saying most pro bb’ers don’t do abs. Not so. My point was that an argument that the explanation for a given pro’s midsection not being the way a given person thinks it should be is generally not going to be that he should have worked abs more or better.
Whoever the poster was criticizing, most likely he was working his abs harder and better than a whole lot of folk that the poster thinks have great midsections. That was my point.
But I also recognize and agree with Professor X’s point that a given person may not need direct ab work at all to look great in that regard.
Bill, I think Dexter’s midsection would have blown everybody away as it always does - with or without the additional ab-specific training. That’s just the way he is put together.
My point is more that there is this odd thing going on this site; the notion of not doing direct biceps work is being ridiculed in every second thread but at the same time direct ab work is being branded as completely unnecessary.
Disregarding that diet is the key factor in making your midsection visible, I think its absurd to claim that targeting your abs with specific exercises will not go some way to make them “thicker”.
I agree of course that no amount of ab-work will make you look like Lee Priest or Dexter Jackson unless you won the lottery the day they handed out genes.
“Have you ever seen a pro-bb’er with great biceps not doing isolated bicep work?” - no, but I also haven’t seen a pro-bb’er with great midsection not paying his (or her) dues to the holy crunch.
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I think you are blatantly missing the point that really large bodybuilders DO NOT WANT A THICKER MID SECTION. That is why many will avoid training their obliques with heavy weight and why many will simply go with the development they have from training everything else so their waist doesn’t get any bigger when it comes to abs.
You see obese people jumping on these twisting oblique machines as if they don’t get that building up those muscles without losing all of the fat they are carrying will simply make their waist look thicker.
If someone is training heavy enough to even build over 200lbs of lean body mass, they have well developed abs. They aid in stabilization during nearly every other movement.
You won’t be doing heavy pressdowns for triceps without strong abs, so NO, they are NOT just like biceps.
Whether you individually need to work your abs more is an individual matter based on how well they adapt to other training. If you need to work them more, then do. Everyone doesn’t.
This is bodybuilding. People want a small waist. They don’t want small arms.
While no one is implying that no one needs to train abs, when discussing someone who is truly extremely built, it would be rare to find one who had truly weak ab development as well.
Many pros do train abs on a regular basis and many will also back off from training them until right before a contest.