The season of Santa Clause might just have passed, but the tooth fairy still maintains her nightly collection service and the Easter bunny is yet to make his eagerly-awaited appearances around the world this year. We just love our friendly mythical characters and maybe even the not-quite-so friendly ones.

When I was a young child, we had the lesser known and distinctly more sinister Willy Winky.

Apparently targeting his operations more around the Northern European region, he was responsible for ensuring all children were asleep in their bedrooms after bedtime.

Failure to heed his warning of three knocks on the window in the event of non-compliance, naughty children would be carried away by Willy Winky in a sack and dumped in the middle of the woods.

I forget the name, but there was another fellow who would come along and hold a colourful magical umbrella over us resulting in nice dreams, or a black one resulting in nightmares.

Along with the tooth fairy, Mr Winky and Mr Clause, there certainly seems to be a lot of illegal breaking, entering and trespassing going on in family households around the world.

Endearing myths indeed, but it seems most cultures have them, as indeed do subcultures, the fitness culture being no exception.

In this age of information super-highway overload, it can get awfully tricky separating fact from fiction. Unfortunately for us, when our health and fitness goals are at stake, misinformation can lead to plenty of wasted time and effort.

Some of the most persistent of these myths seem to be centred around the quest for the development of legendary ‘six-pack abs’.

The six-pack is truly a minefield of myths, the first of which might as well be wearing a red hat and bushy white beard: the ‘lower abs’. Rectus abdominis is one muscle, and anatomically is not divided into upper and lower sections.

It originates up on the breastbone (sternum) and ribs, and inserts down at the pelvis. When is contracts, it pulls these two points together. When it relaxes, these two points conversely move away from each other again.

The resultant joint action is either a flexion (curling) of the spine and an extension (straightening) of it respectively.

If you attempt to compress your stomach right now by bringing your shoulders down as close to your hips as you can, you will feel rectus abdominis doing the precise job it has evolved to do.

Simply put, any exercise that involves bending or curling of the spine against resistance will engage this muscle, without having to worry about its upper or lower sections.

Exercises that are traditionally performed to target the mythical ‘lower ab’ region are actually targeting a different muscle altogether: the Iliopsoas group, more commonly known as the hip flexors. Iliopsoas actually runs beneath rectus abdominis, originating from the spine, running down through the pelvis and inserting on the femur, the major bone of the thigh.

Whatever part of the body you look at, it is the body fat that sits on top of muscles just beneath the skin that obscures their contours

The hip flexors are therefore responsible for lifting the legs up, just as we do when performing leg-raising movements and exercises with the intent of targeting the ‘lower abs’, or pulling the shoulders towards the legs just as we do when performing traditional sit-ups.

While sit-ups do target rectus abdominis indirectly too, the primary involvement of the hip flexors in this movement is one of the reasons the abdominal crunch is a more popular choice for those wishing to train rectus abdominis, since it is more faithful to its actual functional role: flexion of the spine rather than the hips.

To perform an abdominal crunch, lay down in the traditional sit-up position, but instead of raising your back up off the floor, imagine a pea positioned just under the small of your lower back, and try to squash it against the floor, flattening your back completely and allowing the shoulders and hips to rise slightly. Simply breathe out as you crush the pea, and in as you relax.

“Fair enough,” I might hear you say, but that still leaves the little problem of a flabby or undefined lower abdomen region.

“The top of my abs are alright, but the lower part just doesn’t seem to respond,” is a plea we hear all too often. Never fear, just keep crushing that pea with crunches or any other popular abdominal exercises of your choice, and consider our next ab-inspired myth the Easter bunny of fitness industry legends: the toning myth.

We all know the Easter bunny brings us chocolate, which is precisely one of the worst things for hampering the development of ‘six-pack abs’. The real culprit here is body fat, something which the lower part of the abdomen tends to accumulate more so than the upper. Whatever part of the body you look at, it is the body fat that sits on top of muscles just beneath the skin that obscures their contours.

The less body fat you have, the more of your muscles will show. It really is as simple as that. The lower abdominal area will show more as you get leaner, and once you get lean through healthy eating and exercise, you’re just going to have to have faith in the natural shape of your rectus abdominis muscle, which does vary slightly from person to person.

So don’t let your fitness success be carried off into the woods in a sack by dead of night, and stay on guard for legends and myths.

matthew.muscat.inglott@mcast.edu.mt