Posing routine, morning and night show.

How to get published in a magazine. Do you want to cover the next Muscle & Fitness? These are the simple steps to get started. Hosted by David Kimmerle

Total Body Advantage Coach Doug and David Kimmerle abdominal training. This is what a set should look like, good music in the background and training with pure heart. This was not staged, it was filmed on an I phone so I could learn from the video and ensure I am training correctly. This is a great exercise and I dare you to try to do a set of thirty, then 2 more 2 minutes apart. The pump is incredible.

Most of the time I do obliques on different days than abs, I really like to do hanging knee ups to the side, hold crunch think about the process and then back down. The exercise can be duplicated with straight legs as well. I do as many as I can with perfect form then cheat a few to failure. I usually do about 5 minutes per side each exercise.  The 5 minutes is a massive set of pausing and training, example if you can not do another one and only 1 minute has passed rest for 15-20 seconds and keep going until the 5 minutes is up, accountability is on you, do not give up unless you have to.

I like doing hanging leg raises or knee ups, usually both,bringing my knees above 90 degrees for 4 sets of 20; I rest about 30-45 seconds between sets. Sometimes I start with a 1-20pd dumbbell between my shoes.  If done correctly that is all for the day.

I like to do roman chairs for sets of 500-1000, it takes about an hour but it is amazing cardio and total fatigue of the abs and secondary muscles. Advanced would be to add a dumbbell between your shoes 5-30 pounds.  Finish 500-100 of these and that will be the total for the day. TIP whenever doing any leg-up or leg raise always concentrate your efforts above 90 degrees, this is why decline sit-ups are so great.

Tip- Prioritize the lower abdominal in most exercises, this means do the movement in a way that strains or brings a burning sensation to the lower abdomen. The lower is so much harder to build and usually smaller than all than all the others..

I like to do inclined sit-ups with perfect form,  chin to chest,  thinking about each movement as though I am showing the gym.  4 sets of 10-20, then grab a weight and do 4-8 sets of 2-3 reps. With a steep decline it allows you to work around your 90 degree point ( between your upper body and lower body) in a more structured environment. Never waiting more than a minute between sets.  Train for a  little more than twenty minutes.

I also like to just sit on the crunch machine or sit-up machine and do 30 minutes of as many of whatever weight I choose. Similar to a chest day or Roman chair day when I like to do 500 or more in 50 minutes. Total failure at that point, it is amazing.

Tip – If you wear a heart rate monitor you can  hold your efforts accountable. If your heart rate is 70-90 then you probably did not try as hard as your brain was telling you were.

Tip – Try to remember as many times a day as you can to flex and engage your core, if you are sitting in a chair, walking on the street or training try to flex and hold them as many times a day as you can. It is not fun for me because usually I hold my breath inadvertently. I try to do whatever I am doing, breath and flex at he same time. If you do this more than ten times a day it will make a big difference in your mind muscle connection and your efforts on ab day will be more productive. Now that you have read this, test yourself and see if you are willing do everything it takes to have total control of your core, in a business meeting or at a family function, anywhere. If you find yourself thinking about holding and flexing and you choose not to, well then I guess you choose not to reach your potential at an expedited pace. There is some guilt for you.

As you can see my training is very simple, the reason I do it that way is because great abs really are easy to get, it just hurts and the mind muscle connection has to be in place to ensure the abs are doing the exercise intended. That is why I keep it simple, when you get all fancy and move to fast you forget and can’t really concentrate on the muscle group——-  your effort becomes in vain.

Train hard

Hey you probably get a ton of emails from kids wanting advice but I thought I would ask anyway! I’m thinking about doing fitness modeling in the next year or so and I was just wondering how you got started and how I could get started and also how you motivate yourself to eat the way you do, I am on a diet but I cheat a lot when I go out with friends. So I was just wondering how you keep your self from eating junky on weekends! If you could just let me know and give me some advice it would be so awesome! Thanks.

Hey buddy I do get a lot of questions on fitness modeling and motivation, I thought I would use your question to share with everyone my thoughts on the subject.

I got into modeling by luck, when I turned 30 the construction and housing market crashed and I lost my job, my girlfriend and to top it off I realized I was fat. I couldn’t afford to do anything so I started going to the gym. My intentions were to lose the fat suit I was wearing with the anger in my heart about my situation. A job was unattainable so I spent most of my hours in the gym and didn’t miss a day for over 50 days from the first step I took. I was not messing around, everyone knew I wasn’t working. Going to the gym and remodeling my body was about the only thing that made me feel like a man. I started noticing my body changing and then it evolved into a competition with myself on how extreme I could modify it and how fast. My body transformation happened quickly, I did not cheat, my goal was solid, I wanted redemption.

Fast-forward a few months, I received a phone call from ex-girlfriend who was a model and on set, the male talent was a no-show. She asked if I could show up get paid $500 and stand next to a blender, I had no idea that people really did make money modeling. That’s what I meant by lucky, I didn’t have an agent, manager or anybody that even knew how to make money in this industry helping me. In fact I had never even met anybody that thought I should do this or saw any value in my image. I soon found out how lucky I really was when I started going agencies and trying to find a manager, all I got were agencies wanting me to pay them to be a model or turned down. How frustrating, I wanted to make money, “somebody already found the value in me to use my image to sell his blender LOL”, why do these people not see my dream and put me in front of the people that write the checks for guys like me who like to do situps? But I was stubborn, I had a goal and they were not going to take it from me. I could not get an agency and I didn’t want to give up on my dream so I started sending pictures to magazines and trying to meet people in the industry that could tell me how to do it. After endless efforts and disappointing results eventually I landed my first cover, got a manager and an agency to book me that I did not have to pay monthly. And the dream started.

My advice is simple, pick the fitness model or guy you think you look like that look successful in this industry, to be more specific, is able to pay his bills and this industry. Take his picture out of the magazine or off the Internet and post it on your fridge in your car and on your ceiling. This is the guy you are competing with, not your friends or even the buff guy at the gym; you are in competition with your inspiration picture. Knowing that should give you the strength to train harder than anybody you know, to eat better and more structured than everyone you know because you are not in Hollywood standing next to this guy at an audition which could be the difference on whether you pay your rent or not that month. When you feel like you look like the image on your wall, shoot with a really good photographer and take that image and put it next to your inspiration.Be real with yourself, do look like that? Have a friend look at it, if you look like that image then go out and get yourself an agency. This industry is tough on a lot of guys look real good, even guys do don’t do this full-time, we’ve all seen them. If it is truly your goal then you will follow the steps I just gave you, you will know what to eat, why and when. You will have trained religiously and you will never give up. On a personal note, this is exactly what I did, without knowing who he was and what he did acknowledging I knew nothing about fitness because I was fat. The picture I put on my wall and fridge was an image of Greg Plitt. We are almost the same height and almost the same body type. I even made my girlfriend at the time stand next to him at the Olympia so I can have a real snapshot of what she looked like, I was doing my homework.

It took me a while to take a picture that looked anything like even a bad picture of him. Setting my goal that high, I think is enabled me to be real with my accountability and perception of myself in this industry.

Good luck and don’t feel overwhelmed, take that first good picture of you and simply open up the magazines find the editor and send it to them. If you too lazy to do that, I can’t help you. Remember the guys like me are working 24 hours a day creating a brand; you have to work just as hard or harder to catch up or pass us. Game on.

Question

You know, it really is hard to not be “normal “, and if you take it too far you can almost become a recluse. I have found that most of the successful personalities in this business are extreme people; I myself actually battled with the fear of food and started become unsocial because I did not want to put myself into a situation where I would make a poor decision on food and then feel guilty. So I stopped going out, which was stupid because it left me staring at fridge. That was not the right answer either, own your goal and enjoy life AND do not be afraid of yourself, your confidence will come after many outings where you followed your diet plan. I recently realized that dieting was much easier for me if I had a goal. When I started I was overweight, so it was almost easy to diet. I really wanted to get all that fat off me. Once I did and without realizing it I set a goal to get into fitness modeling, which empowered me to stay strong without cheating. Once I became an official professional fitness model LOL and reaching goals beyond my wildest dreams, dieting became much harder.

So I set another goal to compete in a contest, this was foreign territory to me but was just what I needed giving me the strength to structure my world again.

The real answer to staying motivated and not cheating when I go out with my friends is…….. I keep setting goals. Now I have to relive what I just wrote because as of a week ago the contest is over. What is my new goal? I took a week to decide because if I do not believe in my goal, I will not do everything I can to attain it.

I hate guilt and I hate anxiety. I know that if I make a decision outside of my equation for success, which is basically the business plan for my goal, that I will have to feel that guilt and anxiety; I refuse. If you refuse too, you will find yourself looking differently than everyone around you and start looking like that picture on your wall. I hope you take this blog as sincere as it was meant, the rest of your life you will look at how you spent these years.

Did you try as hard as you could, were you a talker and not a doer, did you eat when you shouldn’t have, did you not eat when you should have? Did you call the magazines like suggested, did you even give yourself a chance, will you look back at your life and think what if?
No guilt.Start living your dream now.

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