Saturday, January 31, 2009

Ab Machines - Reassessed

By Jose Loni

Ab machines waste time. These machines will help you strengthen your abdominals, but to achieve ripped abs, ab machines are a waste of time. Increasing your overall metabolism through resistance training, controlling your diet and decreasing stress in one's life will help you achieve your ripped abs.

Resistance training increases the body's metabolism as a result of increased muscle mass. The increased muscle mass also increases metabolic activity, which allows our body to utilize excess fat to fuel our activities.

To increase the body's metabolism, do exercises that train in intervals. These anaerobic exercises increase the body's metabolic activity, which then converts excess body fat into energy. The increased efficiency of the body to burn fat continues for several hours after the training session.

Watching what we eat is another factor that will help us achieve ripped abs. Avoiding processed foods, fatty foods, fast foods and sodas will help keep your diet balanced and help you control your caloric intake.

Controlling the calories we consume, by increasing the number of meals we eat to 5-6 meals and decreasing the meal portions, allows our body to stabilize its energy levels and allow it to burn excess fat as fuel. When the body burns what we eat, it will then turn to the fat and use that as fuel.

Controlling stress in our lives is another factor we need to consider. Stress has the ability to make our body store excess body fat in our belly area. The hormone Cortisol causes our body to react this way, so in order to keep that from happening we must decrease our stress levels.

Practicing yoga, deep breathing, tai chi and meditation can help manage stress and effectively decrease the storage of body fat in the abdominal area.

The reassessment of ab machines indicate clearly that they are not effective and can even be harmful. To get six pack abs, we need to discipline ourselves to exercise regularly and to practice healthy eating habits. - 17944

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