Doing lower ab workouts and why this may actually be setting you up for failure is a question you may be wondering about. Most people focus on lower ab workouts when they want to get ripped abs thinking it’s logical - there’s a flabby problem area so let’s work in that area to fix it. But your body doesn’t operate that way. Flab means there’s fat so you need to lose the fat first and no amount of isolation exercises can burn that fat away.

So many times, we see ab machines and ab exercises that focus directly on the abs. These products claim that by using their products you will lose inches from your waist and flatten your belly. In reality, they don’t work. Spot reducing does not work.

Training just the abs, will not give you rock hard abs. Isolation exercises like ab crunches or lower abdominal strengthening will strengthen your abs, but it will not give you the definition that you want. In fact, you may not notice a physical difference from training the abs only.

If you really want to train your abs, work on your whole body. This can be done by doing multi joint exercise that help kick start your metabolism. By increasing your metabolism, you help your body use more calories and burn more fat.

Doing exercises like squats, lunges, spit squats, chin-ups, push-ups, and step-ups, we train using more muscle groups, which will help us burn more calories. The more muscle groups we train, the more efficient our muscles will be at expending more energy and forcing our body to burn more fat to help fuel our physical activity.

Interval and circuit program training also raises your metabolism by challenging and keeping your muscles in a constant state of readiness to perform at any time. These quick, intense bursts of exercises (for example, jumping jacks-brisk walking-sprinting-jogging) work muscles hard causing lactic acid and carbon dioxide buildup, which needs to be cleared. More oxygen needs to be supplied to the muscles to keep them going. This ongoing cycle enlarges the muscles causing them to use up more fat as fuel.

All this clearing away, replenishing of oxygen and repair work uses up a lot of energy, which the body gets from excess fat stores. Addtionally, the training enlarges the muscles, which now require more energy to fuel their new size. This all translates into an increased metabolism.

Exercises that specifically train our abs will not work. Instead, focus on kick starting your metabolism through multi-joint exercises and interval training. By training your metabolism, you train your body to become a fat burning machine that will give your ripped hard abs.

Tags: diet, diets, exercise, exercise program, fat loss, fitness, lose weight, nutrition, online personal training, Sports, strengthen joints, weight loss

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 5th, 2009 at 9:52 pm and is filed under Sports. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.