Tuesday, February 10, 2009

How To Get Abs The Right Way

By Robert Casewood

Many fitness newbies who sign-up for expensive health club memberships soon learn that getting six pack abs takes more than just plunking down cash and doing mindless reps on pricy state-of-the-art ab machines. Actually, the process of getting six-pack abs has less to do with gadgetry than physiology.

The physiological set-up of the human body makes our midsection a bit more difficult to harden and tone-up. People that don't exercise enough or suffer from slow metabolism have love-handles and potbellies because body fat is stored more around the belly than any other part of the body.

Truth is, the muscles that form the six-pack look aren't any harder to build-up and strengthen than our biceps, traps or pectorals. There's just more frustration in getting six-pack abs because of the stubborn layer of fat covering the contours and striations of the muscle tissue underneath.

Knowing the proper exercises to do, eating the right foods at the right time of the day, and leading a healthy lifestyle can be effective weapons in the fight against The Flab and can drastically reduce the time it takes to attain six-pack abs.

Doing set after set on that expensive ab machine in your pricy home gym or local health club will just be a waste of time if bringing out those ab muscles are your goal. Neither is trying to shrink belly fat by skipping breakfast as this will only slow down your metabolism and make you lose weight from muscle instead of fat.

Fitness experts specializing in fat-loss all agree that incorporating total body cardio exercises into regular weight-training is the best workout scheme optimal for burning body fat. Remember that loss of body fat means less belly fat ergo, sexy six pack abs.

Avoiding food with excess calories and saturated fat as well as eating the proper foods at the right times can also shorten the path to six pack abs significantly. Eating energy-rich foods early in the day can fuel our workouts and give us the energy boost we need to exercise properly.

Contrary to what a lot of people think, cutting-back on food intake to lose weight is not the right way to get abs. Sure, you can lose weight by skipping breakfast or lunch, but this invariably leads to loss of muscle instead of fat. Our body's metabolism slows down when we start to feel hunger pangs. This may come from our caveman days when food was scarce. A slower metabolism means less calories burned from body fat and thus it's better to avoid going hungry by munching on something healthy whenever we have the munchies. - 17944

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