Is Doing Lots of Abdominal Exercises the Best Way to Get Great Looking Abs?

Many people are concerned more with their abdominal area than any other part of the body. There are so many products developed, articles written, videos made, etc. about developing great looking abs that it seems like everyone should be walking around with incredible abs. Of course, this is not the case and one reason is because people assume that doing lots of abdominal exercises creates great looking abs.

Doing lots of abdominal exercises is actually a very inefficient way to get the abs you desire. That said, it is still important to incorporate abdominal exercises into your overall routine. Just keep in mind that abdominal exercises have more to do with the way your abs work (strength, endurance, stabilization, etc.) and less to do with developing well defined abs.

A common belief people have is that their abdominal muscles are not big enough to be clearly seen, so they think doing a lot of abdominal exercise will make them stand out more. Doing abdominal exercise can tighten, tone, or increase the size of your abs, but the problem is rarely that your abs are not big enough to be seen.

The real issue is the significant layer of fat that almost everyone has on top of their abdominal muscles. Until the majority of that fat is lost, your abs will never be visible, regardless of how much you train them or how big they get.

Other people understand the layer of abdominal fat is the real problem, yet they still can develop the mindset that doing lots of abdominal exercises will get rid of their abdominal fat. The assumption being that exercising a particular body part results in fat loss around those muscles.

Unfortunately your body loses fat from wherever it wants, regardless of what muscles are being worked. Many people, including myself, tend to lose fat from the arms and legs first and from the abdominal area last. This can happen regardless of the types of exercises performed during your workouts.

In the end, it comes down to losing enough fat to make your abdominal muscles visible. This means your goal should be to use strategies that maximize your overall fat loss, instead of focusing on just trying to lose the fat around your stomach. Anything that results in losing a significant amount of fat will make your abs look better, regardless of how much time you spend doing abdominal exercises.

The real keys to fat loss are consuming fewer calories than your body uses/burns by eating healthy foods, while not starving yourself, and performing challenging workouts that help you maintain your good weight (muscle, bone, etc.) and stimulate positive changes in your body.

For most people, the place to start is with their nutrition, because a great workout program will not make up for poor nutrition and it is almost impossible to achieve and maintain significant fat loss until you develop good eating habits.

Exercise plays a significant role in developing great looking abs too, but abdominal exercises are not the key to success. Since the goal is to decrease your overall body fat enough to reveal your abs beneath the fat, your focus should be on performing exercises with a high metabolic cost. In other words, perform exercises that are challenging and cause your body to burn a higher number of calories both during and after your workouts.

The best exercises for this purpose are ones that use the greatest amount of muscle mass, because more muscle used means more calories burned. Exercises such as squats, deadlifts, and lunges are great, because they use the majority of your lower body muscles and focus on the largest muscle groups in the body. One good set of these exercises have a more significant impact on fat loss than many sets of typical abdominal exercises.

Of course, performing a few sets of quality squats will not magically make you lose a lot of fat, but over time, performing exercises that focus on your largest muscle groups will result in more significant improvements than performing the same number of exercises with smaller muscles. Other exercises, such as bench presses, push-ups, bent rows, and pull-ups also work a large amount of muscle at one time.

However, I don't want to give the impression that you should only do exercises using your quads, or other large muscles because you should always have a complete training program that works your whole body. Focusing too much on any muscle group results in muscle imbalances and eventually causes problems such as pain or injury.

Traditional abdominal exercises are not very physiologically demanding and they do not burn as many calories as many other exercises, so they have little impact on fat loss or overall body transformation. This is why doing lots of abdominal exercises is an inefficient way to get great looking abs. Even though you may want defined abs, the best thing to do is stop focusing on your abs and focus on your whole body.

That said, abdominal exercises are still an incredibly important part of every health and fitness routine. Having well functioning abs protects your spine, stabilizes your body, transfers force/energy from one part of your body to another, and significantly lowers your chances of experiencing low back pain. Correctly performing abdominal exercises can tone, tighten, strengthen and build endurance in these very useful muscles, but doing lots of abdominal exercises is definitely not the best way to develop great looking abs.

Source:

14 years of experience and education in health and fitness