The Thinking Lifter Blog by Philip Stefanov

The standing barbell shoulder press is an excellent exercise. Improving your strength on it will lead to better shoulder development and pressing strength.

But, it is also a difficult exercise to master and strengthen.

You go in, day after day, week after week and building strength feels like something impossible.

And no matter how hard you try, the annoying plateau doesn’t go away. But let’s face it: the lack of progress isn’t due to a lack of hard work.

Building strength is a lot of work.

It takes discipline.

It takes resolve and it also takes continuous hard effort applied to the right things.

Sure, you can lift heavy week after week and make some progress. But this is one side of the whole story.

In fact, there is a whole other aspect of building strength that you need to know about.

And once you do, you will not only lift the numbers you want but you’ll also find that building strength is not that complicated of a process. In fact, it’s pretty straightforward.

All you need to do is devote yourself and get to work.

Ab training a taboo topic and there are lots of opinions out there.

Most people out there consider it to be super complicated and very difficult to do.

And who could blame them?

A quick search on Google will land you in a vast sea of information with tons of contradicting information.

One article promotes “the newest & greatest core workout” and in the one after that, the author states that direct ab work is not necessary.

As someone who stumbled around, trying to figure it all out, I know first-hand how frustrating it gets.

The good news?

Ab training is neither difficult nor complicated.

There are a few factors you need to be mindful about and today, we’ll go over them.

We’ll also go over and answer the question “How often should I train abs?”

By the end of this post, you'll know what the best exercises are, how often you should train your core, and how to get your six pack to show.