Devon Hunter

Hi Devon!

Love your blog! I’ve been a long time stalker, but never commented. Sorry. :-/

You have an amazing body and, more specifically, amazing abs!!!

I’m a 34 year old dancer (EEK!) and was wondering if you would be so kind as to share your ab secrets, please.

I’m 6’1, approximately 170-175 lbs, eat (mostly!) well, and stay active. According to the body composition machine we have here at work, I have only 7% body fat, so my abs should be popping. But they’re not.

I just don’t know what to do to improve my abs. I have decent top abdominals and obliques, but I am nowhere near a “6-pack washboard.” Crunches, leg lifts, ball-work, incline work… I just don’t feel like I’m getting any bang for my buck.

I tried searching through your blog to see if you’ve specifically talked about your ab routine, and while you may have written about your fab abs before, I couldn’t really find much. (The search function is a little frustrating.)

Any tips you’d be willing to share would be most appreciated (or if you can point me to a previous blog entry that would be just dandy, as well!)

Thanks, Devon! Keep on smiling!
Tait.

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Hi Tait!

First, I visited your page and let me compliment you on having so much fun in your career. You’re living a life of performance, and that is utterly fabulous. One of my former students has been doing cruise ships for the past several years, and my former college roommate has been with Disney for over a decade now. Thank you very much for the compliment – it’s funny you should write to me today, since I have a photo shoot, and I was worried about… my abs! LOL At any rate, the shoot seems to have gone well, so I worried for nothing. You don’t look 34 (much as I like to think I don’t look 35)… I think dance is a good pickling agent or something.

I have gleaned from what you have described that you are primarily doing ab work that focuses on two-dimensional movement (especially focusing on torso flexion through the sagittal plane). If that is the case, you should stop your current ab regimen immediately. Rather than strengthening your abs, it is better to integrate your core. The best ways to do this are to do functional movements, which are three-dimensional and involve all the muscles of the torso simultaneously. In order to accomplish this you can do exercises that involve balance, strength, and movement all in one moment. For example, you can turn your bicep curls into a core integration exercise by doing your curls standing on one foot (or by standing on an instability surface like a bosu or wobble board). Push-ups are good for the core when you maintain proper anatomical alignment, and you can make them even more intense by walking laterally on your hands/feet between each push-up. If you are doing legs, consider coordinating a one-legged squat with a deadlift. For work that is specifically core-centric, change up your crunches to something that requires balance (e.g. the Boat from Yoga, or balancing on your Sitz bones and doing torso twists with a medicine ball while slamming the ball down and catching it on each side). To get the core to fire you need instability, so look for ways to create twisting, falling, catching, balancing, and recovering.

Also, remember that diet is 75% of success in fitness, especially where abs are concerned. You’re entering your mid-30′s, and your metabolism may have changed despite your constant activity. Examine how much sugar is in your diet. Replace any excess with vegetable material.

I hope this helps!

Devon.

So, if you are ever interested, you can see here how I have discussed an ongoing eating issue. I’m not going to go into it here, and I’m not going to post links, because a lot of that history is embarrassing and painful, and I don’t feel like looking at it right now (especially when I have such good news). If you want to know more on the “back story” of this, you can do a search at the bottom of the page for “anorexia,” “dysmorphia,” or “eating disorder.” I don’t want to dwell on that, so you’ll have to go look it up yourself.

Okay, so I had an “AHA!” right in the middle of starting Part 2 of 13 for the Establishing a Career in Adult Entertainment series (I will do that either today or tomorrow). For quite a while I’ve had zero trouble with eating and remembering to eat. I’ve been enjoying food, and everything has been awesome; however, for the past three weeks I have simply dropped off completely from eating regularly, eating only when other people suggest it. And what was particularly scary yesterday is that I felt empowered and beautiful because of it. NOT GOOD. NOT GOOD AT ALL.

Then I made a series of connections that I can’t believe I never understood before…

When I was nine years old I had two falls one after the other. I fell out of a tree, landed on my back across a root, and knocked the wind out of myself. About two days later I was swinging on some scaffolding at a friend’s house. I was trying to show Jamie some new stuff I’d learned for the high bar at gymnastics, my hands slipped, and a fell across a lower beam, striking the exact same spot in my back. Obviously, I was a bouncing baby boy. Ever since then I have had a vertebral subluxation at the level of Thoracic-6 (T6). You can actually see it: My spine disappears there when you look at me from behind.

This misalignment eventually caused me all sorts of problems as a dancer, and I started seeing a chiropractor in college. College, if you’ll remember, is when my weight was at its lowest: I had gotten down to 111 pounds during my sophomore year (I currently weight almost 150 pounds, so imagine me 40 pounds lighter). It was bad. But in retrospect, I remember always being hungry immediately after an adjustment and finding a way to tolerate the horrendous food at the college cafeteria. Years pass and I now go to my massage therapist on a weekly basis. Every time Ron presses on a certain point in my neck, the action releases the tension in my mid-back, and I get ravenously hungry. Okay, here is where the “AHA!” happens.

Three weeks ago I tweaked my neck/back during sleep, but I also had to cancel both my massage and chiropractor appointments for two weeks in a row. The pain went away, and I thought my vertebrae had moved back into alignment on their own. I didn’t realize I’d stopped eating enough over the course of weeks. Yesterday, as I was about to blog for Part 2, my phone’s alarm went off reminding me to eat prior to working out. I realized I’d not eaten at that point for 28 hours, and that although I had a remote notion of needing food, I wasn’t particularly hungry, the thought of food seemed abhorrent, and I felt as if I’d successfully vanquished the personality flaw of hunger. BAD BAD BAD. I made a point of going to the chiropractor yesterday, because I was feeling out of kilter, and I mentioned my suspicion that there was a connection between my spine, massage, and appetite.

Thoracic-6, the location of my subluxation, is the place where the nerve that feeds the stomach branches off from the spinal cord.

NO!

Yes…

In retrospect I realized that maintaining my back was helping to also maintain my appetite. Being a dancer and a model definitely added to the pressures of looking a certain way and maintaining a certain weight; however, I was aided in my self-destructive behavior by those residual injuries from when I was nine years old. Gymnastics, dance, working out, etc… All of that was knocking my T6 out of alignment all these years! This misalignment alone isn’t responsible for everything that was feeding my self-esteem issues; however, I now have a clear picture of one way that I can make a tangible improvement in all of this.

This is extraordinarily liberating. It is also helpful on a practical level. You see, I don’t (anymore) purposefully avoid eating, and I am not afraid (any longer) of food; however, there are times when I simply don’t get the impulse telling me I’m hungry, and when I’m busy (which is always) I simply forget to eat. I don’t realize I’m hungry, and after all those years of starving I know how to ignore the sensation without realizing I’m doing it. But some hints that I can recognize are the symptoms of hunger: I feel frantic, I can’t concentrate, my moods cascade through hundreds of unrelated and bizarre emotions in a matter of minutes, I get ANGRY over NOTHING, and my hands shake. Yesterday all that was happening, but I was actually resisting eating anyway.

My chiropractor put my back in alignment and within moments I was so hungry that I was afraid. The urgent need to eat hit me so fast and so hard that I almost passed out. I’d gone nearly 30 hours without ingesting anything AT ALL. And there it is: I have to maintain the alignment of my spine. It isn’t a fix for any emotional/psychological issues I have concerning appearance and self-esteem, but it is a practical aid that can remove part of the compounding factors that have caused me a great deal of angst.

Okay, I gotta go eat… later.

I don’t normally ask for advice here; however, I’m sleep deprived, and my inhibitions are down. I have always been a very light sleeper, but it’s getting worse, and sometimes I feel like I’m waking up choking and desperate for air. I already sleep with an eye mask, ear plugs, and a light sleep aid; however, I have just pulled an unwilling all-nighter. I appear to be dealing with a cold, and the congestion kept me up. I never fell asleep last night, so I ended up getting out of bed at 7:00 and filing paperwork. I really am beginning to feel panicky: My sleep is getting more and more erratic, and my moods suffer badly when I’m hungry, tired, or both. I don’t want this burning my fuse…

Does anyone have any advice or any stories to share? I don’t have insurance (I’m one of the 50,000,000 who can’t get it. I was on mood stabilizers when I got depressed as a high school teacher back in 2002, and now all the insurance companies claim I’m a suicide risk and refuse to cover me). What can I do, aside from chamomille tea and an over-the-counter sleep aid? I feel that in addition to the other cascading negative effects, that I’m beginning to develop long term circles under my eyes – I fear I will never be able to catch up on all the rest I’ve lost over the months and years.

Happy Imbolc!

Well, I figured that if the front were up, the back should be, too. Be warned… it’s a lot of booty to fit into one screen.

Here’s a fun post. Nothing of any real depth. I just thought it was cool that a pic of me got posted on www.guyswithiphones.com

I just go back from a nice massage after a short trip to DC. The dance company had a performance this past Friday night (we did a dance using “The Seven Deadly Sins” as a theme), and so I could do only a short visit up north this weekend. I do like the road trips to DC and Atlanta: I get to sing (badly) for several hours there and back. San Francisco next! (No singing on the planes…)

Just so you know: I have appreciated the support and condolences from all of you over the last few weeks, and everything my friends, family, and readers have done to be supportive has helped me heal since Grampa’s passing. He will always be missed, but I am back to feeling optimistic, energetic, and happy. It isn’t disrespectful to Grampa that I “already” am not sad anymore: I am a better person for having known him for 34 years. Being the person he helped me become is part of his legacy (and that gift would be squandered in sadness). So I dedicated all my (bad) singing to him on the drive home today. I’m sure he was smiling patiently somewhere…

Have a great week everyone!

UPDATE: 02/02/11 – Happy Imbolc! Here’s the back side.