I found this on another website (linked from the “Vince Abs” thread) attributed to Vince Gironda:
Another aspect of which no one is aware, is that abdominal work should never be done by a beginner in weight training. Any abdominal exercises involve the Solar Plexus.
This is the area sometimes known as the ?second brain? and direct abdominal exercises can stunt muscle growth in other areas, especially where the starting bodybuilder is concerned.
Anybody care to comment on this?
Sure, I’d like to comment:
Lol.
(Until I see a physiological or anatomical basis for the comment that doesn’t involve a ‘second brain’…)
My second brain resides a tad lower…
Who said the drugs weren’t as good back then?!
LoL not one helpful comment there aye mate!?
I cant really comment as I have no experience, I guess the only real way would be to try it out?
Vince is well know I;ve read most of his books and he talks A LOT of sense. I expect when he refers to second brain, he means that it can have a significant affect on the body!
Best of luck!
The high number of bodybuilders, novice and advanced, doing direct abs work proves Gironda’s theory wrong.
Vince was a pioneer in many ways and had a lot of great ideas, even before “their time”. He was also an eccentric who spouted off a lot of things that turned out to be nonsense. This topic would appear to be one of those times…
[quote]CC wrote:
Vince was a pioneer in many ways and had a lot of great ideas, even before “their time”. He was also an eccentric who spouted off a lot of things that turned out to be nonsense. This topic would appear to be one of those times…[/quote]
Agreed.
Where’s this vince abs thread?
As a student of Neurology and Neuroscience, I will have to say that it is unwise to simply toss out Gironda’s idea of a second brain. This idea supposedly dates back to antiquity and ancient asian cultures, and is supposedly the emotional center of the body. Today we’ve found that a large amount of ganglion cells reside in this area, probably used for sending signals from the vital organs to the higher cortex, and a mixing of this signals is thought to result in “butterflies” in the stomach or a “gut feeling”.
Going on about the newer scientific breakthroughs regarding the brain, what gironda may have been hinting at is that this area need not be trained hard, as synaptic terminals will be stronger (literally, thicker axons and dendrites due to repeated firing) in untrained lifters than the synaptic connections in the periphery (arms, legs, etc).
Also, more from a lifting standpoint, gironda may have seen a beginner spending large amounts of energy building up his abs as a waste of energy that could be spent working other under-developed bodyparts. Again, i’m no expert on the subject. Anyone with an advanced degree I encourage to respond and correct me if I’ve completely missed.
The only thing I can think of:
Pretty much every worthwhile exercise hits that abs somehow. Bench, squat, dead, clean, jerk, rows… all of them hit the abs, at least if you do them correctly.
That means two things: first, you can probably get away without doing a whole lot of direct ab work, assuming you’re doing a lot of compound movements.
But more importantly, as far as this thread goes, if you’ve overtrained your abs, if they’re still trying to recover from yesterday’s Beach Muscle Blitz, you won’t be able to do the compound movements correctly. Week abs means a weak squat, a weak bench, etc.
So my theory is that he figured overstimulating the abs would lessen one’s ability to go hard in the other exercises. That is, though, just a theory.