Discover Your Abs: 12 Best Ways to Separate Abs from Flab

Wade Souza
Wade Souza, Yahoo! Contributor Network
Jan 24, 2010 "Share your voice on Yahoo! websites. Start Here."
  1. Nutrition: Your diet is the most influential way to influence your body composition, especially in the abdominal region. By minimizing the intake of processed foods, sugars, and unhealthy forms of fat you can greatly reduce overall body fat. Choose natural, label-less foods!
  2. Nutrition: Focus on fat-burning foods! Increase your intake of vitamin-rich, low-carbohydrate fruits and vegetables, healthier fats such as avocados, fish, lean-all natural meats, nuts, and olive oil. Healthy fats and protein increase satiety and lessen insulin spikes that ultimately lead to carbohydrate cravings and increased insulin resistance in our cells.
  3. Nutrition: Notice a trend here! Your fight for finding your abs is in vain if you ignore your nutrition. Eat a protein-rich breakfast to start your morning metabolism and eat healthy, balanced foods and combinations the remainder of the day. Eat with a purpose and look at food as a source of fuel, not as a means to satisfy cravings, reduce boredom, or ease emotional distress.
  4. Destress: Stress releases the hormone cortisol that ultimately leads to the accumulation of fat around the liver and in the general abdominal region. Identify and eliminate existing sources of stress and develop strategies to reduce stress in life, such as yoga, exercise, stretching, deep breathing exercises, sauna/spa services, meditation, reflection, and prayer.
  5. Rest, Recovery, Sleep: Adequate sleep (generally 7-8 hours) helps maintain healthy metabolism, facilitate cell and muscle repair, and reduce the levels of our stress hormones. Incorporate a stress reducing strategy before bed to calm your thoughts and mind to help you sleep better. Aim to eat not more than 2 or 3 hours prior to bed, in order for your body to maximize its repair potential.
  6. Detox: Alcohol and other toxins often lead to uncontrolled episodes of unhealthy eating, while simultaneously slowing our metabolism. The prevalence of toxins in our body from the environment, sugars, additives, and pesticides in our diet, as well as drugs block our fat burning receptors and impair our metabolic rate. Exercise, a diet rich in anti-oxidants and real, whole foods, and limiting exposure to environmental toxins are the best strategies for reducing the presence of harmful toxins in the body.
  7. Be More Active, Burn More Fat: Find ways to be more active in your everyday life to burn more calories. When you exercise, achieving the proper exercise intensity and duration is the key to maximize your fat-burning potential. Exercise diversity, partner workouts, group classes, music, and personal non-food related rewards are great motivational methods to increase the enjoyment of exercise and neutralize plateaus.
  8. Form: In all lifts, particularly core exercises, focus on proper form to maximize results and minimize the potential of injury. Enlist the assistance of a qualified personal trainer or self-educate yourself with the resources available at your bookstore, library, or online.
  9. Ab Activation: Learning how to activate your abs prior to each rep (squeezing your belly button in towards your spine) will isolate your abdominal muscles, improve form and posture, and train your TVA muscles to tighten your abdominal area.
  10. Incorporate Multijoint Exercises: My favorite exercises to strengthen the abdominals involve multi-joint movements such as high pulls/hang cleans, squats (regular, front, weight-overhead, split, one-legged, squat and presses), deadlifts (Regular, Romanian, w) shrug or high pull), and hanging exercises from a pull-up bar.
  11. Progression: Train your abs like your other muscles. Rather than doing a million crunches or the same exercises repeatedly. Vary the resistance (weights, bands, med-ball, partner), angle (use bench, decline bench, physioball, hanging), speed, and plane of movement.
  12. Stretching and Posture: Emphasize proper posture when you walk, work, and exercise. Walk and sit confidently with your shoulders back and an active core to encourage lengthening increase core function in relation to your spine, internal organs, and energy transfer between your upper and lower body. Furthermore, stretching (Yoga works wonder to de-stress, strengthen, and stretch) also enhances your range of motion and leads to a leaner-looking you!

Published by Wade Souza

Souza graduated with distinction from the Exercise Science: Sport Management Program at the University of Kansas. Souza currently resides in Dallas, Texas and is employed as a certified Personal Trainer and...  View profile

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