Sunday, February 1, 2009

How To Get Abs Faster Than Your Friends

By Robert Casewood

Many fitness newbies who sign-up for expensive health club memberships soon learn that getting six pack abs takes more than just plunking down cash and doing mindless reps on pricy state-of-the-art ab machines. Actually, the process of getting six-pack abs has less to do with gadgetry than physiology.

Our bodies have a natural tendency to store energy as body fat and for some reason it's concentrated around our midsection- giving some of us with surplus energy a potbelly and unsightly love-handles.

In fact, the muscles around our midsection aren't any harder to develop than say, the chest or the biceps. It just seems that way because belly fat is the most stubborn- always the last to go because of the body's predisposition to store excess fat there.

Doing the proper combination of exercises optimal for burning body fat as well as adopting healthy eating habits are the real secrets to getting six-pack abs in the shortest amount of time. The key word in the fight against The Flab is metabolism.

Hitting the abdominal machine at home or in your gym and doing a gazillion reps won't do you much good if you don't incorporate total body cardio exercises in your workouts. Not even if you combine this with limiting your calorie intake which can actually result in muscle-loss.

Experts have discovered that total body workouts that keep the heart rate at a steady rate just below the anaerobic threshold (when you can no longer carry a conversation) are the most effective in burning body fat in the least amount of time. Cardiovascular exercise done over an extended period uses up the most energy from stored fat rather than glycogen which is necessary for muscle development.

Another way to accelerate belly fat burn is to compliment your workout regimen with healthy eating habits. Timing your consumption of the different food types (proteins, carbs, etc.) can aid the body's ability to absorb nutrients and keep it from packing on the pounds from body fat.

A lot of people have the notion that cutting-back on food intake by skipping meals is the fastest way to lose weight and flatten the tummy. This can in fact be detrimental to losing belly fat because the human body purposely slows down metabolism in order to conserve calories when we start to go hungry. It's actually better to avoid from going hungry and eating just enough whenever we feel like it. - 16083

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