Ab exercises are important to develop your abdominal muscles but keep in mind that your number one priority is to lose belly fat so that your abs can show. You can read my post with more tips and tricks on how to lose weight and how to get six pack abs.

Losing fat is doable for everyone if you use the right diet, exercise in moderation and get enough sleep and water. Having said that, lets talk about ab exercises!

If you go to the gym regularly you already have well developed abs but they are not showing yet. Manny exercises that you do in the gym develop your abs because these muscles are used to stabilize your torso. Squats, dead lifts and standing exercises are all great for the abs.

Remember that doing hundreds of crunches to define your abs is a myth. You can’t lose localized fat with specific exercises – fat is lost progressively throughout your body and it does not burn of or melt near the muscles that you are working on with high reps.

Belly fat is also the most stubborn fat to lose and will be the last to go. To know more about this you can read the post on how to lose belly fat.

Crunches

Crunches are very popular and they are one of the best ab exercises. I will give you some tips on how to do crunches properly so you get the best results from your workout:

• Lie down and put your hand on your chest or behind your head for a little bit more resistance. When you put your arms behind your head you shouldn’t pull on your head… the arms are there to give you some more weight and not to forcefully bend your neck.
• Then you have to elevate your shoulders from the floor so you feel your abs contracting. Typically people say you have to bend to bring your head towards your knees but I find it better to keep looking at the ceiling and not bending your neck. You will feel more burn in your abs and you won’t be cheating unintentionally with your arms and making a big curvature.
• When you reach full contraction you should hold it for a second before you go back down.
• You should not turn it into a sit up because it will work your hips and stress your back muscles.

Exercises to lose belly fat are probably the number one myth in the fitness world. The fact is that ab exercises don’t make you lose belly fat. Exercises can only stimulate your muscle to growth. What makes you lose belly fat is doing exercise in general and the more calories you burn the more fat you will burn.

Doing ab crunches may be hard but it is an exercise that doesn’t burn a lot of calories, like most exercises that isolate just one muscle group.

The best type of exercise to do if you want o lose belly fat is to start weight training. Now I know what you are thinking… if you are a girl its “I don’t want to look like a bodybuilder and have a man’s voice!” and if you are a guy you are thinking “I don’t want to look like a bodybuilder, I just wanna look lean!“.

Don’t worry boys and girls, muscle is not that easy to grow and you only get too much muscle if you do a massive amount of anabolic steroids. Losing fat is also not easy and it doesn’t happen by magic or with magic pills.

The most important thing is to have the right mindset for six pack abs and be healthy. For this you need to realize that what most people tell you about losing weight is false. This goes for what your gym buddies say and this goes for what supplement companies say. Corporate America molds people into the mindset that you have to buy their products… over and over again. They don’t really have an interest in you getting healthier or thinner, they prefer repeat customers that come back and buy their products over and over with their hard earned cash.

You need to go past the marketing BS and start educating yourself about how to get healthy… and you will be surprised that you don’t need supplements to be healthy or look good.

Weight Training to Lose Belly Fat

Like I was saying, the best way to lose belly fat and other fat is to do weight training. Why weight training? What about cardio?

Cardio burns a little more calories during the workout, but it just accelerates your metabolism for just 2 hours after the workout. Weight lifting keeps your metabolic rate up for 48 to 72 hours after the workout. This means that after you do a good weight training workout you will be burning calories while you sleep, while you sit and while you go about your day. This goes on from 48 to 72 hours after the workout and you end up getting much more calories burnt that when you are running on the treadmill for an hour and a half 4 times a week.

Another interesting thing is that when you do a real weight training workout you can burn as more calories than the average person burns off in acardio session.

Another advantage of training with weights is that you will gain some muscle. That extra muscle will make you metabolic rate go up, because muscle requires calories to be maintained.

Lets get something strait: Muscle and fat don’t grow by themselves. Muscle grows when you exercise correctly and eat healthy. Fat grows when you eat junk and don’t exercise.

The myth of doing exercises to lose belly fat is related to the myth of losing localized fat with specific exercises. This is impossible and does not exist.

The body stores fat in its own way, when you gain fat it is stored all around your body; around your mid section, legs, buttocks, neck, arms, etc. Men get fatter around the midsection and women get more fat on the hips. The bad news for all the people that want to know how to lose weight and fat is that the belly flab is the last fat to go and it is the most stubborn one.

I have talked about how to get a six pack and how to lose belly fat in other articles and there you can read some more information on the subject.

What Exercises to Lose Fat?

The best exercises to increase your metabolic rate are compound exercises. Compound exercises are the ones that use more than one group of muscles at the same time, these will make breathing like you are doingcardio.

Manny people have the idea that they need to do thousands of crunches to have good abs. While crunches are good to develop the ab muscles they are not going to take care of the fat that is hiding your abs. Most people already have developed abs under the fat layer, and if you have been doing compound exercises then you have well developed abs underneath your fat for sure!

Belly fat is one of the most frustrating things when you are trying to lose weight… it seems like progress is always so slow and the fat is so stubborn!

Today I want to talk to you on how to lose belly fat so that you can improve you appearance and start working on that new and healthy look.

There is no natural way to lose belly fat fast… and there are no localized exercises to lose belly fat, love handles or any fat in a specific location. The human body as a natural way of storing and burning fat and you can’t decide which fat reserves you target when you want to loose weight. You loose fat gradually over all your body and no exercises can impact that. Exercise helps you develop muscles and burn calories.

The only way to remove fat quickly is through plastic surgery, with a tummy tuck, a liposuction or a non invasive liposuction… and I don’t recommend that!

Going crazy on the treadmill and doing weighted crunches until you are dizzy also does not help! You have other things to do first!

You want to avoid thinking too much about loosing belly fat! Instead of thinking about the results invest as much time as you can learning how to eat healthy, how to detox you body and start doing some light exercise to feel better. To lose belly fat and get a six pack you have no other choice than adopting a healthy lifestyle. This will make you feel more energetic, healthy and you will lose weight naturally.

Do not believe the celebrity diets and the catch lines of weight loss infomercials. All that crap is hyped up and false, it is just used to sell magazines, pills and products that you don’t really need. Before you start thinking about using weight loss supplements you need to get enough rest, eat right, detox and start exercising. I will guarantee that you will be seeing results without the need of supplements.

Eating like you are supposed to

The 2 main differences between a big belly and an athletic six pack are two things: belly fat and a bloated stomach and intestines.

Bloating, constipation, irritable bowel syndrome, acne, headaches and many more common problems are caused by digestive problems and those can be solved by eating right and drinking enough water.

If you want to eat healthy and start detoxifying your body these are the first things you should do:

No sodas, juices or coffee

Sugar is one of the biggest enemies of a healthy body and thanks to big companies like Coca Cola and MacDonalds we ingest hundreds of pounds of sugar a year. There is an article on the site about sugar addiction and how you can go through it.

You will be very happy after you do this. You will have more vitality, more concentration and feel better.

If you suffer from constipation, headaches and lack of energy you can attribute that to excessive sugar intake.

Drink water

Water is the most abundant element in the human body and it helps to control your appetite. Most people do not drink enough water and that leads to a whole array of problems of physiological and psychic nature.

To know more about water and why you should avoid drinking diluted sugar beverages read Are you Dehydrated?

No fast food or fat food

If you go to fast food restaurants you get what you pay for. Cheap food made with cheap ingredients, lots of sugar, trans fats, saturated fats and all the toxins and free radicals that go with the processing and preservation of these garbage foods.

These foods give you constipation, bloating and an inflamed bowel.

Eat vegetables, fruit and meat

The biggest recommendation that I can give you is to eat organic food. Organic food has more than 8 times the nutritional value of their industrial farmed counterparts and you are not ingesting toxins from pesticides and the preservation process.

Most fruit, vegetables and meats are radiated to have a long shelf life, they are colored and sprayed with chemicals to make them look and smell better…

These products have also been grown with synthetic hormones, antibiotics and pesticides… and all that goes into your body when you eat it. Not ingesting these toxins will help your body to restore its normal state and your immunity will become much stronger.

Nowadays people become fat because of all the empty foods they eat. When you eat all this garbage food with a lot of fat and sugar you just keep eating and eating… and you feel hungry a little later.

You eat so much because your body is asking for the nutrients that it was expecting from real food!

When you ingest this toxin rich garbage the body needs to isolate these toxins and poisons because they can’t go running around in your system… so guess what it does? These toxins are stored in fat so that they stay isolated and away of your blood stream.

Start doing some exercise

Doing some exercise and burning some extra calories is great if you want to lose belly fat. You don’t need to go to the gym and run on the treadmill for 2 hours. Start out by walking for 15 to 30 minutes each day. When you get used to that and implemented some better food habits you can start to go to the gym and do some workouts.

I already talked a little bit about aerobic versus anaerobic exercise in the article on how to get a six pack. It is more efficient to do weight training workouts that will burn more calories because of increased metabolic rate, than it is to be running on a treadmill for an hour.

The extra muscle mass will also increase your metabolic rate permanently because muscles require calories to be maintained. More on that in other articles!

Don’t focus too much on belly fat

The bottom line is that you shouldn’t be measuring everyday to see if you lost half an inch of belly fat. Concentrate on implementing measures to make your diet and fitness better and before you know it you will be looking much better and feeling healthier, without constipation, bowel problems, bad skin, headaches or lack of energy!

If you want to know how to lose belly fat then you need to look at your body as a whole. When you start taking care of your body great things will happen. Your immunity will grow stronger, you will look better… and most important of all: you will feel happier and more energetic!

When people want to tips on how to get a six pack they associate it with a heavy training regime with cardio, crunches and other exercises for the abs until exhaustion… I have good news for you! You don’t need that.

In reality this can lead to weeks or months of exercise without seeing any results. It is likely that your abs are well developed enough if you have been going to the gym for some time.

The problem is that your abs are covered with fat. So in order to have a visible six pack you just need to reduce your body fat that is hiding your abs. You will need some muscle mass in your abdominal muscles so that you can have a good looking six pack, but that is easily achieved with some exercise. The main thing you have to worry about is lowering your body fat percentage.

Guys can see their abs when they go below 10% body fat and women can start seeing them when they go below 16%. Going lower will make the abs look really good, but it gets harder the lower you go. Everyone’s abs will start showing at different body fat percentages because the body fat distribution is different from person to person.

The fat distribution is also different in men and women, in women more fat tends to be stored in the thighs and the hips, men have more body fat in their abdominal area. You can get your body fat percentage measured to monitor your progress, it will give you motivation.

The Mindset for Six Pack Abs

On this blog I will also talk about the mindset that you should cultivate in order to stay motivated to achieve your goals. There are hundreds of diets, tips to lose weight, exercise plans, nutrition philosophies, etc. Most of these methods are written by health care professionals or nutritionists and this advice will work in almost every case. The biggest fight will be in your head.

People that can’t lose weight come up with excuses because they are lazy and are afraid to suffer. You have to take control of your senses and create the will power to achieve your weight loss objective and get your six pack visible. That is how to get a six pack! You do the right exercises, you eat right… and you keep doing it. Reading about it won’t help you… you actually have to apply it in the long term!

You have various tools at your disposal to create the right fat loss mindset. The first part is educating yourself about the subject so that you know that the process is worth it and that your six pack objective will give you a better life because you will look better, be more confident and be healthier.

Diet and Lifestyle for Ripped Abs

When you want to lose weight you need to make adjustments to your diet and workouts.

The most effective way to eat healthier is to learn the difference between a diet and a lifestyle adjustment. If you do a diet you will be in a restrictive mode… you want to finish your diet as fast as possible because it is something that gives you stress and limits your enjoyment of life.

By gradually incorporating changes to your eating habits that are compatible with you and that you can do without sacrifice, you start eating healthier with a positive attitude that makes it easy to keep it up.

You can find more information on how to lower your body fat, nutrition advice, exercise tips and everything you need to lower your body fat, make your abs visible and be healthier!

The same holds true for exercise. Exercise is healthy and it is possible to enjoy it, even if you are not a sporty person. You can adapt your mind to be able to tolerate and start to like doing exercise. You don’t need to suffer and train like professional athletes or bodybuilders to have a good looking physique. You can get healthy and look great with a moderate amount of exercise.

You have to test out different exercise types and sports until you find something that you enjoy doing so that you don’t have to sacrifice yourself and suffer while you do exercise.

How to Get a Six Pack Fast with Supplements

After you have applied the changes to your diet, exercise plan and created a healthier lifestyle you will start to see gradual results. The results will be greater with the amount of effort that you put in and you can get even quicker results by using supplements to make your fat loss faster.

People require different approaches to training and supplementation because they have different objectives and come from different places, some are bodybuilders, some are loosing weight, some just want to loose belly fat and don’t even want the ripped look. Throughout the site you can find more advanced articles explaining how to supplement and how to train for each objective.

I wish you good luck on having success in your weight loss and fat loss journey. Changing your lifestyle to become healthier, better looking and more confident will result in a longer and more happy life.

There is no simple answer to this because the question is very vague. The answer to how long does it take to get a six pack is different for every person. It depends on your body fat percentage, how much fat you have around your abdominal area and on what you are doing to lose fat.

It can take from 2 weeks to 6 months, depending on the person’s amount of fat and what you are willing to do to get lean. Getting six pack abs is possible by eating healthy and doing exercise to burn calories and get your body fat percentage under 11%.

I already explained in how to get a six pack that men and women have different fat distribution profiles, men have more fat around the belly and women have more fat on the thighs and legs. Your six pack abs will start showing once you get rid of the fat layer that is covering your abdominal muscles.

You also need decent size in your ab muscles but almost everyone has that after they did a moderate amount of exercise… in the majority of cases the abs are hidden under the fat layer.

Even if you have undeveloped ab muscles you should start by losing fat, the muscular development will come automatically with your exercise routine.

If you are a bodybuilder and have a good amount of muscle mass you can get your six pack showing pretty quickly. Bodybuilders have a lot of muscle mass and therefore have a higher metabolic rate than other people. Muscle needs calories to be maintained so the more muscle you have the faster you burn fat. By increasing the intensity of the workouts, adapt their food intake and using some fat burning supplements you can get results very quickly.

One of the tricks to losing fat is increasing the amount of muscle and doing strength training exercise. Most people associate six pack abs with hours and hours ofcardio exercise but that is misleading. When you do aerobic exercise you burn calories and the metabolic rate is increased for the next 2 hours. With anaerobic exercise the metabolic rate is increased for 2 to 3 days! This means that after doing an intensive weight training workout your body will be burning more calories for the next 2 to 3 days.