Craig Ballantyne on Abs and Meals

Certified strength and conditioning specialist Craig Ballantyne has a great blog on Men's Health website titled Belly Off: The Trainer. On his blog, Ballantyne, author of Turbulence Training, offers up great advice about diet and fitness.

Here's an excerpt from a Q&A recently published on his post "Six Pack Abs Exercises & Meals":

Q: Craig, what do you eat at the start of the day?
CB: Sometimes I will start the day with a bowl of blueberries and pecans with perhaps a little natural peanut butter stirred in.

I'll then follow that up an hour or so later with a 3-4 Omega-3 egg omelet with 1/2 ounce cheese, and several servings of raw broccoli and peppers, and an apple. Both meals come with 1-2 cups of Green Tea. (Sometimes I have leftover steak with the eggs.)

Other days I'll have the omelet first and the berries and nuts later, depends on how hungry I am.

Eating raw vegetables first thing in the morning might sound odd, but if you do it for a week or two, it will quickly become habit.

Oh, and for all those folks who have written in saying that "I MUST be on an extremely restricted diet in order to get those abs", well, I'm very sorry to disappoint you.

Q: Most folks skip breakfast because as you know... life is really busy sometimes... what tips can you give us for a quick nutritional breakfast-on- the-run?
CB: Grab something high in fiber and containing some protein.

An apple and an ounce of almonds and a cup of yogurt is a great start. As is any combination of those 3 foods. And there's no reason not to cut up some vegetables the night before and add that to the mix.

Protein shakes are fine too. I don't use them and they aren't necessary in order to have a great body, but they are a convenient source of protein.

Q: How come you don't include steady state cardio workouts in your fat loss program?
CB: Cardio is just not an efficient use of your time.

Interval training has beaten steady-state cardio in the two "head to head" research studies comparing the two, and frankly, interval training works much better in the real world.

And you get done in half the time, which is the other important factor. So even if interval training was only AS good as cardio for fat loss - and not actually better - you'd still be better off choosing interval training because it takes less time.

Q: Conventional thinking says we have to do a whole bunch of sit ups and crunches to get six pack abs. And most of us hate doing sit ups and crunches! How come you don't have these exercises in your workout plans?
CB: Neither of the exercises is necessary to get six pack abs.

Crunches are a huge waste of your time. Such a small movement does little in terms of burning belly fat or sculpting your abs.

Every smart trainer knows that if you can do a resistance exercise 50 times in a row, like you can with crunches, that there is little benefit to body composition.

Sit ups are a more difficult exercise, but like crunches, sit-ups are hard on the low back. Spinal flexion - when you round your low back - compresses the discs between your vertebrae and is actually the same mechanism that causes disc herniations.

So both are unnecessary and risky moves. Too risky for my tastes.

An advanced replacement for crunches and sit ups is the "Pull-up with Knee-up", and an intermediate replacement is the Stability Ball Rollout.

Both are great to get more results in less time.

Download an outline of Craig Ballantyne's diet and a sample workout here

Why does this matter to you? Because it's advice from someone who knows what he's talking about! So if you want your abs to pop, here are 3 takeaways from this Q&A session:

1. Eat 6 small meals a day. Aim for 1g of protein per pound of body weight, eat tons of veggies and fruit, and eliminate sugar from your diet.
2. Switch out steady state cardio workouts and with high intensity interval training (HIIT).
3. Ditch the crunches! You can strengthen your core with compound exercises that work your upper and lower back, glutes and hamstrings.