Developing Those Six-Pack Abs

It's ironic that the icon for both the peak in muscle conditioning and the pit of laziness is a six-pack. For the former it's on your stomach and for the latter it's poured into your stomach. Of course, it's a lot easier to pour it into your stomach which explains why many more people drink six-packs than develop them.

If you're serious about getting your abdomen into six-pack condition, you need to know and keep in mind that there is no magic bullet and that it's going to take a sincere commitment to succeed. Realistically, developing the muscles for the six-pack appearance isn't actually the most difficult part of the process. Removing the layer of fat hiding your six-pack is the hard part.

This is the reason that you see guys doing crunches for what seems like eternity, doing it religiously every day and still not developing that six-pack they are so desperately chasing. For all they know, they have developed it, they just can't see it!

So, the first key to developing six-pack abs is fat reduction. While it's possible to focus on a specific muscle set and develop it without really developing the rest of your body, this simply isn't possible when it comes to weight loss. You may see advertisements for products and pills promising "spot" weight loss (i.e., reducing just your tummy fat), but those advertisements are designed for the bottom line, not the waist line.

You're going to need to alter your diet, pure and simple. I'm not saying this because I sneak into your house while you're sleeping and look at your fridge, I'm saying it because it's the safe bet: most people need to alter their diets if they want to lose weight and achieve optimum health.

Burning fat is really a simple concept in theory: you need to burn more calories than you put into your body. There are two ways of burning calories and, to effectively develop your health and especially your six-pack, you should master both of them. The first is through exercise, especially aerobic and cardiovascular exercise. Get sweating and get your heart beating faster and you'll burn through calories. The second is through speeding up your metabolism.

Contrary to popular belief, metabolism is not automatically set by genetics. You can speed up your metabolism and, by doing so, you will burn more calories on constant basis. Steps to improving your metabolism include drinking lots of water, exercising and building your muscles, eating high nutrition foods frequently and not skipping meals.

Those last two steps need a bit of explaining for you to fully benefit from them. The classic three-times-a-day meal plan is not the optimum way to eat. For maximum efficiency, you should eat five to seven smaller nutritious meals a day. Doing this ensures that your body doesn't have a lot of excess energy sitting around waiting to be used, because you're taking in less at a time.

Skipping meals, the most common and least successful tactic for people trying to lose weight, can wreak havoc with your metabolism. Your body is a highly adaptable machine designed, at bare minimum, to survive. It adjusts to your eating habits and then, when suddenly you skip a meal, it slows down your metabolism to ensure that you have enough energy to get to your next meal. Eating regularly is necessary to keep your metabolism up.

With your nutrition under control, exercise portion comes into play. As I recommended above, regular cardiovascular exercise is necessary for losing the fat. You also need to do weight-training exercises to shape and tone the muscles in your body and abdomen. These two exercise types need to be balanced, because overdoing either one of them is highly counterproductive.

Once you get your body fat down to six-pack level, then you can slowly reduce the cardiovascular exercise and increase the weight training if you're interested in developing your muscles further. If you do that, however; remember to adjust your daily calorie intake accordingly to compensate for the reduced cardio exercise.