Top 5 Abs Exercises for the perfect Flat Stomach
Just kidding! But this is the perfect clickbait isn’t it - hands up who hasn’t responded at some point in their lives to a headline like this and wished or believed that it was that simple. “Just 5 exercises and I’ll look like her!”
Well I’m 5’8” with an athletic build that doesn’t lend to curves and I know that I have a tendency to hold fat thanks to the perimenopausal stage I’m in. I’ve either been straight up and down skinny or straight up and down with a little middle bulge my whole life and mostly been a size 10 up to a 14 since I was 18. I’ve NEVER looked like this woman or any of the other impossible images we’re constantly fed. So I’m NEVER going to look like her if I do a few abs exercises.
You see, images and headlines like this one lead us into believing that there is a way to get the “perfect” abs from just 5 exercises and they’ve caused us all self esteem and confidence issues when we don’t look like that, don’t respond to harder workouts with a “rockin’ bod” and don’t pop back into shape immediately post birth. By responding to the clickbait we are doing ourselves a massive disservice because we deny the extraordinary things we have achieved and the stories in our bodies from a lifetime of hard living.
If I continue with myself as an example, and please here put your own story into these words: I was a ballet dancer from age 3 to 14 to a high level, I then switched to rowing as a sport and competed as a Junior athlete for the GB team during which time I hurt my back quite badly. I then played with lots of different sports, ending up pre kids doing triathlon, rock climbing and alot of pilates. During that time I dealt with various injuries including the original back injury flaring up now and then. I then had my 1st child in 2010, all OK except for a tear and some ventouse assistance, and my 2nd child in 2012 whose fast delivery resulted in a large 3rd degree tear, and I was left with an abdominal separation and undiagnosed postnatal depression. I had to claw my way back to fitness and strength over at least 5 years and then I hit perimenopause in early 2020 at the age of 41.
All that life (and I’m only mentioning sports and activities here, I haven’t mentioned my Dad dying of early onset dementia, or other emotional trauma) is written in to my body. The way my body moves and responds is all a jigsaw of the physical and emotional history of my life. If I (you/we) desire an appearance that is wildly different from our own, we are preventing ourselves from owning that story and it becoming accepted, able to move on.
One of the most powerful things we can do as women, for ourselves firstly, and then to show our children how we can love ourselves, is to stand grounded in our bodies, open and vulnerable and say:
“This is me, This is who I am”
For many this can be very hard, women spend their whole lives being compared to unachievable ideals, we have fairly limited autonomy over our bodies and we still follow people on social media who post airbrushed, posed and professionally shot photos of their apparently perfect life and find ourselves lacking. When we are constantly held up to scrutiny by the image the rest of the world holds as ideal we will never deal with the fundamentals of what we can do to function better and in a way that we need and deserve.
You don’t need 5 misleading exercises that aren’t going to be truly effective for you as an individual body, you need to find a movement practice that works with you around the demands of your life uniquely, that connect your body in ways that it may be missing and that progress you towards where you want to go in life so you have freedom to be who you want, with whom you want, doing whatever the f**k you want!
