What Chuck Does

Abs Gone Wild!

This is mainly a post about abs, but I already know that it’s going to encompass several topics so bear with me.

I am not officially doing Larry’s “6-pack Challenge”. To my knowledge only Dai and Larry are doing the challenge. I have however adopted a variation of the challenge where I want to drop below 10% (according to my Tanita scale) and basically be “ripped”.

This is what I’m working with so far:

Basically, under perfect conditions my abs look pretty good. Perfect conditions consist of good lighting, flexing, getting the right angles etc. But under “real-world” conditions, my abs aren’t going to look half as good. This is why I’m still trying to make gains in shedding fat, and working out. I’m also eager to find out if I can ever get the 5th and 6th pack to make a cameo appearance. My goal is to have my abs look so good that at any given time, I should be able to take off my shirt and show off my 6-pack.

In the process of trying to take pictures of my abs, I learned a few things. It’s really hard to take good pictures of abs by yourself. In order to control lighting you basically have to shoot indoors. But since there isn’t much light indoors, you have the added challenge of proper exposure without using a flash (flash washes out the abdominal definition). So I push the ISO to 1250 or 1600 which has the side-effect of increased noise. Then since I have to see how I’m posing, I have to shoot into the reflection in the mirror. This makes every shot basically 2x as far as I’d like. I could use a zoom lens, but that exaggerates small movements and vibrations thereby making it harder to shoot handheld. Then there’s the challenge of staying still for the exposure, while flexing as hard as possible. To make matters worse, I have to keep my hands and the camera out of the way so it doesn’t screw up the lighting.

But the results from my little photoshoot are pretty good. While there’s still work to be done, I will use these pictures as inspiration to stay the course and push for more gains.