Saturday, January 3, 2009

Crunches - The Truth

By Jose Loni

The truth about crunches! We all seek answers to achieving ripped abs. The truth about crunches is that they are good for our abdominal muscles, but they will not give you the ripped abs that you want. To get ripped abs, you need to work on fat burning exercises that will burn overall fat, watching what we eat and eliminating stress from our lives.

Doing crunches may be stopping you from getting six pack abs because it doesn't focus on what needs to be trained. Crunches strengthen, stabilize and develop the abdominal area. But to get six pack abs, we need to focus on overall fat burning.

Exercises that have a fat burning effect are overall exercises that help increase our metabolism, which allows body fat to be burned. The increased metabolism rids the body of excess fat in our abdominal region, when this occurs, the six-pack abs under the fat will become more visible.

Metabolic activity has been shown to increase through resistance training exercises. Increased metabolic activity allows the body to utilize the fat as a fuel source and reduce overall body fat. The muscles that we develop from resistance training makes our body become better able to use our body fat to fuel our activities.

Watching what we eat is also an important aspect of achieving six pack abs. By increasing the frequency of our meals to 5-6 per day and reducing the portions of each meal, we allow our body to maintain our energy levels throughout the day and maintain our blood sugar. Being aware of eating foods, which consist of carbohydrates, fat, minerals, vitamins and proteins will help us get our six-pack abs.

Stress has a way of counteracting our efforts. With increased stress, Cortisol is released and causes the body to store more fat in the abdominal area. The fat is stored there to help prepare the body for an emergency situation.

There are several ways to decrease the amount of stress in our lives. Activities like deep breathing, tai chi, and yoga, have ways of calming the body down and help to reduce stress.

Crunches, in truth, are good for you but to achieve defined ripped abs, we need to understand we need to focus on other factors. Activities like resistance training, watching what we eat and eliminating stress from our lives, will help us achieve our ripped six-pack abs. - 15995

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