Get Those Six Pack Abs

Many people believe that to obtain six pack abs you have to do hours upon hours of ab workouts and nothing could be further from the truth. While ab workouts do ad to the shape and strength of your six pack abs it will not help them show, so if you can not see your abs get up off that floor, stop doing ab workouts and read this article.

The very first thing you have to do in order to get your abs to show is.... you guessed it loose the fat. I know you may be saying:

"Wow Jason i didn't know that! How could you be such a genius?! Who would have thought you need to lose fat to show you abs.... I'm going back to my Ab workouts"

And yes i do hear your sarcasm, so please do not go back to the ab workouts and instead let me explain. Ab workouts burn a very minimal amount of calories, and in order to burn fat you have to burn calories, 3,500 calories in a pound of fat to be exact. remember back to your health class where you learned you should only eat 2,000 calories a day, well that is not exactly true everybody has a different metabolism so they burn calories quicker, but it does act as a good guideline however. That being said a 2,000 calorie a day diet will not help you lose fat in fact it will actually most likely help you maintain the weight you are at, so what do we do to lose that weight?

There are really only two ways to lose weight, lower the amount of calories you intake (dangerous, and can lead to anorexia when not careful), and to work out. obviously i think working out is the better answer. say you burn 2,000 calories a day but you have fat and you want to lose it, so you could lower your caloric intake to 1,500 and 500 calories are taken out of a 3,500 calorie pound, this process would take 7 days to loose one pound (and that is if your metabolism burns 2,000 calories a day). By working out, however, you can raise the amount of calories your body burns in a day and still eat the complete 2,000 calories for the day, but a workout can be confusing to many people and they have no idea where to begin.

If you are looking to loose fat skip right past the treadmill and all of the other cardio machines and head straight for the weights. now many of you may be wondering why i picked the weights instead of the cardio machines, this is because a free weight workout will burn a lot more calories then a cardio workout (cardio workouts should be done at least 2 times a week in between weight working days to improve your cardiovascular system, so take a walk). a free weight workout burns more calories then a cardio workout because just like running it raises your blood pressure and breathing rates, but it does one thing that running does not and that is muscle growth (women, do not be afraid to use weights you will not get big muscles like men unless you use supplements). muscle growth is important to calorie and fat loss because the more muscles your body has the more calories your body will use and not store, 1 pound of muscle needs 50 calories a day to survive. say you have 50 pounds of muscle that would be 50 X 50 = 2,500 calories that your body needs to eat to not lose weight.

So in short, do one or two ab workouts a day, but make sure you lift weights because without losing fat your six pack abs will never show.