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If you can do more than 12 reps of an abdominal exercise, you’re

either doing the reps too quickly or with poor form, or the exercise is

too easy for you. As with any other exercise, you should be struggling

on the last repetition. Doing 100 continuous reps of any ab exercise is

inefficient.

To make abdominal exercises more challenging, you can do them at a

slight incline, so that your head is lower than your legs. This is more

effective than holding a weight plate on your abdomen. However, don’t

fix your feet in place; this shifts the work from your abdominals to the

muscles in your lower back and at the front of your hips.

A Simple Functional Workout ....................................................................

In this section, we provide you with a total-body workout— a snazzy term

referring to a routine that covers all the major muscle groups in your body.

You can perform this routine either at home or at the gym. All you need for

this workout are dumbbells (four to eight pairs should suffice) and a weight

bench. In case you have access to health-club machines, we include a second

exercise, which we call a gym alternative, for each muscle group.

This section also offers general rules for lifting weights safely as well as tips

on how to progress after you master this workout.

Reading the exercise instructions ...................................................

Don’t worry: Our directions are in plain English, not like those assemble-it-

yourself furniture manuals. For each exercise, we tell you which muscles the

move targets. Then, where appropriate, we include a Warning icon that iden-

tifies potential joint injuries and reminds you to pay special attention if

you’ve ever injured the joint in question. Never work through an injury; if you

feel pain, review your technique and slow down the pace to make sure you’re

performing the move correctly. If you’re using good form and you still hurt,

skip the exercise for now. You may want to try it again after you’ve been exer-

cising for a few weeks. Or, you may need to try a different exercise that tar-

gets the same muscle.

You notice that in the exercise descriptions, we use a few phrases over and

over again. Here’s a brief explanation of these phrases, which you’re likely to

hear from trainers and group-exercise instructors:

“Pull your abdominals in.”This doesn’t mean to suck in your gut so

hard that you can’t breathe. Simply pull your abs slightly inward, a

movement also known as tightening or contracting your abs. You’re

214 Part IV: Lift and Curl: Building a Stronger Bod with Weights