A lot of people yearn for a smaller and tighter waist or a flatter stomach. This seems to be a very important goal especially for women who embark on a weight loss initiative.
Unfortunately, a lot of people have very weak abdominal and core muscles. Your core muscles consist of all the muscles within the trunk of your body. This includes the muscles in the abdomen, mid and lower back, hips and neck. Strong core muscles are essential for most balance and movement. The most obvious effect of weak core muscles is a hunched posture and back problems.
Off interest for a tighter waist or a flat stomach are the abdominal muscles. A lot of people could be having protruding stomachs attributed to weak abdominal muscles. This is simply a problem of the abdominal core muscles not being able to hold the entire contents of the abdomen firmly enough. The contents of the abdomen include your organs and intestines. Its just like a flimsy plastic bag bulging in all directions when trying to hold the contents that are within it. One may not even have excess fat and yet the stomach protrusion can be very obvious.
The Transverse Abdominis Muscle
The transverse abdominis or TVA, is an abdominal muscle whose function amongst others, is to stabilize the spine and firmly hold the contents of your abdomen in place. This is the innermost muscle in the group of flat abdominal muscles. It is placed beneath the internal oblique muscles. The TVA helps to provide provide stability in the thoracic and pelvic areas. It is also the primary muscle helping a pregnant woman deliver her child.
As mentioned earlier, it also helps to keep the waist nicely tucked in which is the main interest of this article. It is important to emphasize that this muscle is below the fatty layer of the stomach. All this muscle helps to do is to prevent your organs and intestines from bulging out due to lax muscles. It does not do anything for the fatty layer under the skin. Fat must still be burnt via a caloric deficit.
How to Strengthen the TVA and Flattening Your Stomach
While the TVA works in unison with other core muscles for any core exercise, it is difficult to target as it is an internal muscle. As such one needs to perform a more targeted exercise. This is an exercise that you can do anytime or anywhere, even as you read this article.
4 steps to train the TVA with the vacuum exercise;
- SUCK your stomach in by exhaling all the air out of your lungs and bringing your navel as close as possible to your spine,
- Hold each contraction for up to 30 seconds.
- Do at least 3 contractions up to 3 times a day
That’s all it takes. Because the nature of this muscle, it can be trained every day at any time. If you are religious in doing this day in day out, your waist will shrink, because of the tighter TVA muscles.
A lot of people that I talk to have not heard of this exercise. That is not surprising considering that there is no incentive by any industry to teach this exercise. You don’t need any special ab-exercisers nor do you need any special guidance or training. All you need to do is to diligently perform the 3 steps above. I am not a believer of spot training as fat is stored in layers and can only be burnt off. This exercise certainly can help to strengthen lax TVA muscles which help to firmly keep the contents of the abdomen in.
Problem with other abdominal exercises
Traditional exercises that work the rectus abdominis muscles or your 6/8pack muscles cannot ultimately give you a flat stomach as these muscles don’t have the function of holding the contents of your abdomen. A strong and firm TVA will firmly keep all the abdominal contents within the abdomen and thus giving the appearance of a flat stomach. For a firm stomach one needs to train the rectus abdominis via the various abdominal exercises and the TVA with the vacuum exercise.
There is one caveat here. If you have a whole layer of fat in your abdominals, don’t expect this exercise to get rid of it. While it may shrink the waist slightly, it will not burn fat. As I have said before, the only way to get fat out of the body is by burning it by a proper regime of exercise and nutrition.
Tags: flat stomach, transverse abdominis, waist, TVA, core muscles, hunched posture, tighter waist, tighter stomach, protruding stomach, rectus abdominis, vacuum exercise
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this is a useful tip! will practise this diligently!
How can you exhale all the air out of your lungs and not breathe for 30 seconds? Holding your breath for 30 seconds I can understand – at least you have oxygen in your lungs to burn, no?
The vacuum exercise requires that you exhale the air and suck in your stomach as much as possible. This works the TVA muscle. I guess the challenge here is that a person with lower core or fitness strength may find that difficult to do. As such, start by holding it in for 5 seconds and then move to 10 seconds and so on. Since its a simple exercise, it can be done on a daily basis and you can improve really fast. Hope that answers your question.
This is another great article with a lot of terrific information.
Keep it coming as I love to read what my colleagues write when we are all on the same page.
debra mazda, creator of shapelygirl fitness
I think that the biggest problem with losing weight is that people often do not continue doing exercises or keeping diet. It is very much in our brain. We would like to get it but it is hard to sacrifice for it. And even if one get it we often do not maintain it so after couple of months everything is as before. http://flatstomach-weightloss.com/
Hi, just a note on the exercise. Actually exercise physilogy suggests that you may breathe some during the thirty seconds, but what you want to do is hold the squeeze of the muscles. It is the contraction of the muscle, not the breath, that helps top tighten and tone. There are very few exercises where holding the breath would be benefical- underwater swimming being one!
Regarding the brain- research shows that it takes 60 days for the brain to fully recognize the habit and another 30 days to make it habit. This is why most diets fail- we westerners can’t do anything for a month, let along 3 months! A really good book that can help you understand how to make substancial change is “The Kaizen Way.”
Jude
Exercise Physiologist
Blue Willow Wellness and Tai Chi Kung
http://www.meetup.com/bluewillow-wellness-taichikung