Have you noticed that most people will never fail to include abdominal
muscle exercises in their routines and yet somehow or other, they can
never own that coveted 6 pack abs?
Have you been religiously doing your abdominal muscle exercises? Is your
abs showing to your satisfaction? No? Why? Do you know that your
abdominal muscle is one of the easiest muscles to build but yet why is
it that most people have difficulty in developing that 6 pack abs?
Here is the truth. Those of you who are working out your abs regularly
do probably own that much sought after six pack. Yes, you do. The only
trouble is that your belly fat is covering them. Your abs will not show
up well if you have a body fat ratio of more than 12%. The more fat you
burn off, the more defined your abs will be. You will own that rippling
washboard abs when your body fat is 10% or less. So if you have fat on
your belly, forget about abdominal exercises and burn off the fats
first.
There is another reason why people put in so much effort to develop
their abdominal muscle and yet their abs are not showing although they
have low body fat. Again, there is a simple explanation. They are doing
the wrong exercises and working out in bad form.
Let's take for example the most common abs exercises, the sit up and the
leg raisers. Everybody seem to be doing these two exercises not knowing
that these exercises really don't do much for their abs. Don't believe
me? Ok.try this. When you do your sit up or leg raisers, place your
palms on your hip on the area connecting to your thigh and perform the
exercises. Tell me what did you feel? Ahhh..you are getting it. Those
muscles there are doing most of the work. Those are your hip flexor
muscles. Since your hip flexors are doing most of the work, how can you
develop your abs effectively?
So you say, from now on I will do crunches instead. Well, I have another
surprise for you.
Most people perform their crunches wrongly too. Think about it. Why is
the exercise called "crunch"? It is because you must squeeze your abs so
are that you are crunching them. In order to squeeze your abs hard, you
have to curl up like a prawn and breath out all the air in your lungs at
the top position and then squeeeeeeeze the muscles so hard that you feel
a burn. That will take a few seconds to crunch out all the air before
you lower to the beginning position again. You can't do this effectively
if you just go up, down, up down, up down rhythmetically. So, if you
have been doing hundreds of crunches everyday with minimal result, now
you know why. In fact, it is almost impossible for the average guy to do
tens of properly performed crunches and not to say hundreds of them. The
same squeezing principle applies to other abs exercises.
Ok..now that you know why your abs are not showing up well, so get on
with burning your fats and perform your workout in correct form. You
will then see your 6 pack abdominal muscle in no time.