Tuesday, January 13, 2009

Ab Exercises - The Long Road

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.

Interval and resistance training demands our muscles to work more and harder. Consequently, our muscles will need more fuel to be able to work and our body then looks for excess fat, usually in the stomach area, as extra fuel to burn.

Remember that increasing metabolism also maximizes the body's efficiency and ability to burn fat even several hours after the training session.

Our diet is important in that we can fuel our bodies with quality food and allow our body to burn calories more efficiently. By eating food that is balanced in lean protein and complex carbohydrates, we can energize our body to easily burn the calories we consume. Avoiding sugar snacks, sodas, fast foods and fatty foods will allow our body to not store the excess calories as fat and help us watch our caloric intake.

Eating smaller portion meals and increasing the number of meals we eat per day to 5-6 meals, will help us stabilize our blood sugar levels and help maintain our energy throughout the day. This way we will have enough energy to burn as well as optimize how our body will burn excess body fat.

Ab exercises are, indeed, the longer, possibly more harmful, road to six-pack abs. Care must be taken to avoid injuries and muscle imbalances. Get six pack abs by increasing metabolism and having diet discipline.

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