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 For men, the midsection is the area most likely to gain weight first. And the last to loose it. Shifting weight from your stomach and hips can be a nightmare scenario. Its when we start musing on the irony of a six packs of beer V six pack abs. How could two great sounding things be so opposed?
The first thing to realise when beginning to train for your dream six pack is that there is no way to specifically loose weight from one area of the body. Doing 1,000 sit-ups per day may indeed give you wonderful looking abs. But only because the effort involved in doing so means you have lost weight from all over your body - not just your midsection. So forget about all the gimmicks out there that promise weightloss from the hips or stomach area. Your body decides where to shed weight from - and no amount of targeting an area with machines will alter that. What these machines do (and what 1,000 sit-ups a day can do) is make the abs and stomach muscles stronger and more pronouced. This gives the illusion that the expensive infomercial machine has indeed worked wonders! And the effort involved can of course produce weight loss - but not just from one specific area. Think of it like this- Can you ever remember seeing anyone with a killer abs that had lards of fat on their legs? Or shoulders? Or arms? Exactly.
 If you want killer abs there are three things you really must start doing. Cardio, weight training and dieting. Cardio can be in the form of running, walking, cycling, rowing, dancing or sex. There really is no limit. Do cardio three times a week minimum. I always recommend running as the most intensive form of cardio. Its free, easy to get into and can be done anywhere. Unlike sex. Cardio is perhaps the most important element of the above three.
 Weight training helps us build better, stronger abs. The more effort is put into the training the abs area, the thicker and stronger our stomach muscles become. Which means that they look more defined and pronounced when we have out body fat percentage correct. Focus on exercises that target the abs such as sit-ups, crunches, reverse crunces and cable crunces (if you have cables)
Its important to realise we were all born with a sixpack. Everyone of us has it. All we need do is correct our body fat ratio and our abs will naturally become visible. Cardio speeds up this process. The weigth training strengthens our core muscles. The last part of the jig-saw is correct body fat percentage. This is what truly make our abs visible. Unless we include dieting in our regime, we are really making it an uphill battle to have a killer six pack. What we need to focus on in dieting is mainly our intake of fatty foods and the quantity of foods we consume. Get either wrong and we're adding on to our body fat reserves rather than taking them away. In 'Calorie Intake and what it means' we went through calculating what calorie intake we required to start loosing weight. By decreasing our body fat percentage our abs will naturally show themseves. A typical body fat percentage for great ab viewing is around the 10% mark and lower in men. |
