Anyone who has ever read a Batman comic knows how the young Bruce Wayne travelled the world looking for the greatest masters…those men and women who could teach him how to become the very best, in the quickest time possible, in the arts and disciplines he needed to learn.

Let me say this—if Bruce Wayne had needed to learn how to train his midsection—to get it as lean, strong, athletic and goddam stacked as he humanly could—he would have headed from Gotham straight to New York City and worked with Danny Kavadlo.

Danny is one of the greatest calisthenics coaches on the planet. (And by that, I don’t mean top 100. More like top 3.) I know how Danny thinks; I’ve seen how Danny works; I’ve seen the statistics; I’ve seen the results. The athletes who have trained under Danny have made such progress in such short time that to an outside eye—to someone who doesn’t really understand what’s going on—it almost seems like magic. And this is when he works with athletes who are already considered advanced by normal standards.

Normally, to get the kind of results Danny delivers, you’d have to go to New York to train under his guidance (if you could get a slot!) or attend one of the international Progressive Calisthenics Certifications (PCC) where Danny instructs as a Master PCC. (At the time of writing, Danny is one of only two men ever to be granted Master PCC teaching status by Dragon Door. The other is Danny’s brother, the world-famous Al Kavadlo.)

Luckily for the rest of us, Danny has agreed to put his knowledge on midsection training into a manual—this manual: Diamond-Cut Abs.

You might be thinking: But Coach, there are plenty of ab-training books on the shelves. Scores. Hundreds, maybe. So what’s so special about this one? Happy you asked, pilgrim.

There is an image in this book which really rings true for me. The image is of Danny—dressed as Morpheus, from the Matrix—offering the reader a blue fruit, or a red fruit. In the movie, Morpheus offers Neo a more drastic choice: the choice to go back to sleep and live as a slave in a fantasy world, or the knowledge of reality and hidden truths, which will be sometimes difficult, but ultimately far more productive and rewarding. This is a perfect metaphor for current abdominal training.

Most people outside the fitness industry don’t realize it, but modern abdominal training methods—the kind you find in 99.9% of books and articles—are smoke and mirrors. They’re a fantasy, like the Matrix. Folks are told they need this or that supplement (which doesn’t work); they are told a load of complete shit about diet and nutrition (stuff which may work for steroid users, but not normal people); and, worst of all, the drills people are given as training exercises are typically worse than useless. Most modern abdominal exercises evolved (or devolved) in the sixties, when steroids like Dianabol and Primobalan hit the scene. These drugs made all the tissues of the body highly responsive to growth stimulation—even the abs. Juicing bodybuilders got worried that traditional hard, productive abdominal training methods would cause the waist to grow, thus ruining the V-taper so desired in competition. They began to discard the older, functional, strength-producing, truly athletic exercises, choosing to develop methods which could help them tense their abs on stage, but which would be ineffective at actually building muscle and compound strength. Ab work became built around light, high-repetition isolation exercises, based on tensing and toning the six-pack.

In other words, most modern bodybuilding methods are designed to be inefficient! But at least they’re easy to do, right..? Hell, these days you might not even need to actually do anything…you can buy belts now that freeze or zap the fat off your gut while you’re on the can. Or, if you prefer, you can buy a million-and-one fat-burning supplements online, right?

Yep. And if you think that stuff will actually give you a six-pack you might want to check the dictionary—they left out the word gullible!

If you are smart enough to want nothing to do with this charade, then Diamond-Cut Abs is the red pill. In these pages you will learn the painful reality about perfecting the midsection. It may be more difficult than the silly stuff in other books, it may be more old-school than the made-up crap you see on infomercials, but it’s also a truckload more rewarding—because it works, big time. I can promise you that.

Danny is not a bodybuilder in the traditional sense. He learned his craft from bodyweight training, where abs cannot be an afterthought—hell, even push-ups and pull-ups are impossible if your abs aren’t in shape. (A recent scientific study showed that abs are worked harder during pull-ups than during any other exercise!) This manual condenses decades of agonizing lessons and insight into the best book on ab-training ever written. Hands down.

I can promise you that, although it might be challenging, the journey will also be fun. Despite Danny’s encyclopedic knowledge, he doesn’t take himself too seriously, and he’s blessed with a sense of humor.

So whaddya say kid? Do you want the strongest, healthiest, most awesome abdominals of your life? Then grab the red pill.

Let’s see how deep this rabbit-hole goes.

Paul Wade 2014