The Real Reason Hundreds Of Crunches Won't Help You See Your Abs

I’d like to share with you a bit of insight I had during my weekly stroll today.

Today I was thinking to myself as I do from minute-to-minute and I was reviewing some training manuals I had read recently and how I could best help my clients achieve their fitness goals faster.

While I was walking, I noticed we had a bit of rain lately and there were a few ‘splackles’ of mud puddles remaining. I don’t know about you, but I get inspiration from the weirdest stuff…

In this small mud puddle, I saw a hint of a pen. Yes, just a simple writing utensil. It was barely peeking through the surface and for some odd reason, I thought of exercise. Abs to be specific.

I thought, “It’s funny...there’s a perfectly good pen and it’s covered by all that mud. The pen probably works just fine, but as long as it’s covered by all that mud, no one will ever see it.”

This analogy then made me think as to why people come to me with questions about their abs. The questions are usually, “I do hundreds of crunches a night, but I never see my abs,” or, “I run all the time but my abs never show up.”

Here’s the answer…

It doesn’t matter how many crunches you do or how much you run, if you have a layer of fat covering your abs, you won’t see jack. I can do 1000 crunches a night if I want to but if I put on a sweatshirt, how can you tell I have a six pack?

Think of the pen and mud example: Here you have a perfectly good pen, but it’s covered with mud.

Say for instance that instead of the pen being there, there was a beautiful sculpture of a swan made out of diamonds. The swan was so beautifully crafted that even the flawed diamonds in the sculpture are perfect.

Now, as this beautiful, eye-pleasing sculpture is sitting here, how beautiful would it be if I backed a dump truck next to it and proceeded to cover it with a ton of mud?

It wouldn’t matter how beautiful the sculpture is because until you move the mud, you won’t see jack.

So it doesn’t matter how many crunches you do, it won’t matter until you remove the layer of that that’s over it.

You’ll only lose fat by doing the following things:

1. Cleaning up and watching the foods you eat

2. Building muscle to raise your metabolism and burn more fat constantly

3. Doing effective cardio to help burn the excess calories.

That’s it in a nutshell.

I mean think about it, if you’ve been doing crunches for about 3 months and you’re not seeing any results, it’s obviously not working. There isn’t an ab-fairy that’s going to pull out its magic wand and magically give you abs (but it would be nice wouldn’t it?)

There’s only three thing you need to do - clean up your diet, build muscle, and burn off more calories than you need per day.

Crunches don’t burn a lot of energy. You can do crunches until you’re blue in the face but you won’t see a 1-pack unless you burn off the excess fat that’s covering them.

No ab-lounge, cross-crunch, or ‘ab doo-hickey’ can promise you that.

Online home fitness specialist and fitness author and author Lee Smith specializes in helping people get in shape in the comfort of their own homes. For more incredible tips and tactics like these and a free subscription to his "Successful Fitness Strategies" newsletter, visit http://www.howtoachieveyourfitnessgoals.com.