Tuesday, January 20, 2009

Ab Exercises May Be Hurting Your Six Pack Ab Results

By Jose Loni

The truth is, doing ab exercises may actually be hurting your six-pack ab results, therefore, instead of solely doing ab exercises, we must rev up our metabolism and stick with healthy eating to get ripped abs.

When we want six pack abs, we automatically think of doing ab exercises like sit-ups and crunches. Unfortunately, done improperly, these exercises train the hip flexors instead of the abdominal muscles resulting in muscle imbalances. Ab exercises also tend to put our backs in an awkward position causing potential injury.

Doing ab exercises will not give us ripped abs. Instead, we must increase our metabolism by doing resistance and interval training, as they have been shown to yield excellent fat burning results.

When we train with resistance or intervals, we place demands on our body, which causes our muscles to react by increasing its metabolic activity. When our muscles require energy, our body will seek any excess fat and utilize it as fuel resulting in fat burning and utilizing the excess fat in our belly.

A beneficial side effect of interval and resistance training is an increase in metabolism, which allows for extended fat burning even several hours after the training session.

Healthy eating means our body is being fuelled by good quality foods like lean proteins and complex carbohydrates (not sweets, sodas, fatty and fast foods), that allow for efficient burning of calories, therefore little or no excess calories are stored as fat in our stomach areas.

Consuming small, frequent meals around 5-6 times throughout the day prevents our blood sugar levels from going up and down too much. As a result, we remain energetic and manage to maximize excess body fat burning.

Ab exercises are the enemy. We need to be careful and make sure we don't create muscle imbalances and injure our back. In order to get ripped abs, we must increase our metabolism and watch our diet. - 15995

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