Diet Fitness Health

There’s not one reason for you or anyone else to not have desirable six pack abs. If you stay focused and dedicated to good nutrition, continuous exercise, and living a healthy lifestyle, you can have that toned stomach to show off.

However, if you do just a few things the wrong way, you’ll be wasting your time and start to feel like you’re working backward, never making any progress.

One of those “wrong” and pretty ineffective methods you can do when working out to flatten your stomach is doing sit-ups.

You read that correctly but if you’re still not sure, read on.

Sit-ups along with various forms of ab routines the focus directly on your stomach muscles are quite INEFFECTIVE for revealing your six pack abs!

Let me explain why.

1. Abdominal workouts like sit-ups, crunches, torso twists, etc. do not create a high enough metabolic response for your body to burn the excess fat off your stomach. You have a nice pack of abs right now but they stay hidden under layers of fat. What you must do is eliminate the fat off your stomach so your abs can show. However, you can’t “spot reduce” by doing sit-ups and similar ab routines.

2. Incorrect posture while doing sit-ups and other ab exercises leaves the back vulnerable to injury. Most people who haphazardly train either do ab exercises with an arched back (during floor routines) or a flat back (when hanging). The correct posture that will protect your spine is a rounded back. This way, you reach and strengthen the deepest core muscles that support your back. Therefore, attempting sit-ups with improper posture makes them highly ineffective.

3. It is true that sit-ups strengthen your ab muscles but those muscles are hidden under excess belly fat. Ab exercises do not create enough energy to promote the fat loss needed to uncover your ab muscles.

I bet now you’re wondering how in the world are you going to get visible six pack abs.

By doing full body exercises:

Squats Lunges Sprints Mountain Climbers Deadlifts Snatches

There are various techniques to make each exercise above unique so your body won’t be able to adapt as quickly. Performing the exercises with different weights, intervals, angles, and so on will also allow for strength progression.

While you do full body exercises, you use many joints and many more muscles than you would if you were only doing sit-ups. That’s why full body exercises cause a much better and more effective metabolic response than sit-ups. They also increase the fat-burning hormone levels that will help uncover those sexy six pack abs.

Sit-ups are good for toning your abdominal muscles but will not cause your body to burn the fat hiding them.

As you now can see, doing hundreds of sit-ups, crunches, and similar ab routines in hopes of getting your own set of six pack abs is a big waste of time. Why not do something else more productive and effective to have that flat stomach you dream of?

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This entry was posted on Thursday, October 9th, 2008 at 2:30 am and is filed under Exercise. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.