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 the “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.
