Hello and welcome to Fit Body Happy Joints. My name is Shannon. I'm a doctor of physical therapy, fitness instructor, and owner of Evelo Fitness. And today we are talking about hypertrophy of the abdominals or how to grow your abdominal muscles.

And short and sweet podcast, but I think that there are lots of myths that I want to kind of

debunk and I want to teach you how to have the most success in increasing the size and strength of your abdominals.

First off, I did a podcast with a women's health physical therapist. That's episode

number 79 and we really talk about how to train your deep core muscles and

pelvic floor. Training the layer of muscles underneath your six-pack muscle, your rectus

abdominous has to be step one when it comes to building your

abdominals from the ground up. It is so foundational to learn how to engage your pelvic floor muscles, how to engage your diaphragm, how to engage your transverse to dominoes,

before you start adding a lot of load and repetition through trunk flexion extension

so through things like crunches and oblique work, abdominal work, things like that.

If you're an Evela member, there is also a core stability program,

which we highly recommend everybody take.

I truly think that this program will make your trunk work so much more effective and I think you will build muscle

in your trunk and in your abdominals so much easier if you know how to do this core stability work.

We've heard from so many of the members who are like,

oh, I thought I was doing, you know, the burn classes correctly, and then I took this

core stability class or program and, oh my gosh, it makes the biggest difference difference I feel the work so much more effectively so highly recommend

go to take those classes they're only like 10 to 15 minutes long so you can even take them

prior to any of our classes almost as like a warm up and it'll make you

feel more stable in your trunk. And since those classes are not hypertrophy based, they are what's called

neurore education based.

You can take them every day.

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