Ok the first thing to know about getting those ripped abs is fat loss if you want a great set of abs you are going to have to get rid of that fat covering them. You can work on your abs for years but if you don't loose the fat covering them you'll never get what your aiming for. One of the biggest misunderstandings about this is that you can 'spot reduce fat' people think by doing abs exercises they are targeting the fat on their stomachs this is impossible. Fat will only be lost from your body as a whole so do your cardio !.
So why should you not be sat doing 100's of crunches ??..well every one will have different training program that works for them some will do 3 day with 3 muscles groups a day some prefer 5 days and so on but when trying to build muscle (for aesthetics) the same rules apply for individual muscle groups i for example to 3 sets of 10 reps and 3 exercises for that particular muscle. That is what works for me and I do that for all muscles whether it is pecs or abs. For some reason a lot of people have a programme and then when it comes to doing abs they sit in a corner do crunch after crunch, so they are now doing stamina training for the abs when there aim is to build muscle!...so when your doing your abs follow the same programme you use for other muscle groups if you do 4 sets of 8 then that is what you do on abs
keep in mind the principles of training ;
Specificity- your aim is to get aesthetically pleasing abs so train that way don't be training for stamina if that is not your aim
Overload-muscles will only improve when forced to work beyond its usual intensity so to achieve this you can add more weight to your exercise when you are completing your reps easily
RECOVERY- I stress this one because the amount of people saying on these forums I do chest this day then biceps that day' but they do abs everyday . Muscles grow in rest time by overtraining them you can actually slow their growth. Give them time to recover !
Adaptation -the body is very good at adapting to any movement it makes on a regular basis so as just the same as all other muscle groups you will benefit from changing your exercises around every 6 weeks
Reversibility- always remember to maintain or improve on your gains you must keep training if your stop your training your gains will deteriorate
Now you should know how to train your abs you need to understand that different exercises hit different parts of the abs there are upper and lower abs and also the obliques (side abs) and to improve them you will want to do exercises that hit those particular parts although it is not completely this simple a general rule is that any exercise that lifts the legs up to the body like leg lift will do you lower abs anything where your upper body comes up to your legs like a crunch it is your upper abs working and anything where u are bending sideways like side bend is your obliques working. Of course when doing some big compound exercises like squats the abs will b working as the are used to stabilize the weight on your body therefore incorporating some of these types of compound moves in your general program when not doing abs will also help your gains .So when designing your work out program keep all this in mind .
