Thursday, January 22, 2009

The Easy Way to Show Off Your Six Pack Abs - Lose Your Belly Fat



Have you noticed that almost every member of your local gym has some sort of abdominal exercise in their routines and yet somehow, they never quite own those desirable 6 pack abs?

Have you been religiously doing your abdominal muscle exercises? Are your abs showing to your satisfaction? No? Why? The fact is that your ab muscles are one of the easier muscles to build. So naturally you would wonder why is it that so many people have such a hard to developing them.

You may think that you don't already own those six pack abs but the truth is that you already do. The problem is that your belly fat is covering those abs. If you have a body fat ratio higher than 12%, it will be virtually impossible for you to show off those sexy abdominal muscles. In order to get more defined abs, you have to burn off as much fat as possible. You will be able to own those rippling washboard abs when your body fat is less than 10%. So if you have fat on your belly, forget about abdominal exercises and burn off the fats first.

The second reason why you may not be developing great abdominal muscles is because you may be doing the wrong exercises and/or working out with bad form. You may have low body fat but if you are doing exercises with bad form, you are not going to see good results and you are also risking injury.

Let's take a look at some of the most popular abdominal exercises. People are packing in the gym doing hundreds of these exercises not knowing that really don't do as much for your abs as you might think. Don't believe me? When you do your sit up or leg raisers, place your palms on your hip on the area connecting to your thigh and perform the exercises. What do you feel? Those are you hip flexor muscles and those are the ones doing most of the work. If these are the muscles doing most of the work, how can you expect to get strong ab muscles??

So you decide your going to just do crunches instead right? That's fine but the problem is that most people perform crunches incorrectly too. In doing the crunch, you are supposed to squeeze your abs hard so that you are crunching them. Hence the name, "crunch." In order to squeeze your abs hard, you have to curl up like a prawn and breath out all the air in your lungs at the top position and then squeeze the muscles so hard that you feel a burn. That will take a few seconds to crunch out all the air before you lower to the beginning position again. If you are just going up and down rhythmically, it will be nearly impossible to do your crunches correctly. It is extremely hard for an average person to do ten properly performed crunches, no less hundreds of them.

Here is the bottom line, doing hundreds of crunches is not going to get you the results you are looking for. Start working on burning fat and doing your workouts in correct form. In no time you will start seeing your abs show.

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