Healthy Info

By: Richard Taylor

Most women will tell any man that a set of 6 pack abs are one of the most attractive features a man can have. Conversely, I don’t believe there are many men who don’t find a six pack on a woman attractive either! So, with that knowledge, there remains one question to be answered. How do you get your own set of 6 pack abs?

Firstly what are 6 pack abs? They’re basically a set of well defined abdominal muscles. I think it’s fair to say that most people’s abdominal muscles are not visible even though we’ve all got them hidden somewhere. The problem for most of us is the layer of fat that hides them. Therefore in order to get yourself a washboard stomach, you need to essentially do two things:

1. You need to remove the layer of fat covering your abs, this is absolutely crucial.
2. You need to perform some exercises that target your abs, in other words your stomach muscles.

So let’s start with the essential bit first. No amount of stomach crunching will give you the abs you crave if you don’t also remove the fat first. The bad news is that to get a toned stomach you need to adopt a low fat diet that is slightly calorie deficient. By calorie deficient, I mean you need to endure you take in slightly less calories each day than you burn. By eating low fat foods and cutting your calorie in take you will lose weight and expose your abs!

If you prefer exercising to dieting, then make sure you do lots of cardio exercises to increase your heart rate and burn fat. Cardio exercise first thing in the morning before you eat is a particularly effective way to eat in to your fat reserves. The more fat you burn, the more visible your abdominal muscles will become.

Planning your diet carefully, rather than dieting, so that it becomes part of your lifestyle, together with regular cardio exercise will bring you long lasting results. Not only will your abs be more prominent, your whole body will look better and you’ll actually feel better too.

So now we’ve covered the critical importance of losing fat, let’s discuss how you go about adding definition to those visible abdominal muscles. You want to be introducing weight training to your fitness schedule. Now don’t go overboard and make the common mistakes most people do. You only need to weight train once every five to seven days. It’s more beneficial for muscle definition to lift heavier weeks less frequently, than it is to lift lighter weights frequently.

Choose about six to eight different exercises that will target all your main body muscle groups, so that you get an all over body workout. Building muscle is a great way to burn fat. When you do crunches or leg raises to target your abs specifically, add weights to your exercises. Your abs will grow and become more defined if you do twenty crunches clutching a weight, than they will by doing one hundred load free crunches.

So in summary, lose your body fat with a well balanced diet, regular cardio exercise and weight training. Load up your crunches by clutching free weights to build your abdominal muscles, and in a few weeks you should start to see some great results.