To reduce fat in and around your stomach you need to include cardio, muscle-conditioning exercise and sound nutrition. But when deciding on which exercises to perform, how many to perform, and how frequently to perform them for a killer core, take heed of the following tips.
No single ab or lower-back exercise is perfect. Only by performing a variety can you hit all of the various muscles and fiber angles.
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Mix It Up
Mix up the order in which you perform exercises to continue stimulating the muscles.
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Add Stabilization
Spend more time training via stabilization and less time training via movement (i.e., fewer crunches and sit-ups).
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Go Slow and Fast
Use a variety of rep speeds: some faster, some slower.
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Add Fun
Use a variety of training angles (incline, decline, flat) to manipulate the intensity and change the emphasis.
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Change It Up
Train your core 2-4 times a week. Your abs behave like any other muscle group, so train them the same way.
As long as you’re doing your periodic daily contractions, 2-4 dedicated sessions a week will do the trick.
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Fact or Fiction?
If you don’t know it already, be aware that spot reduction is a myth. Ab exercises don’t rid your abdominal region of fat. No direct metabolic pathway connects the muscle cells in your abdominal area to the fat cells surrounding them.
For any muscle to use stored fat for energy, your body must first send that stored fat to the liver, where it is converted into fatty acids before being sent to the muscles for use as fuel. In reality, the energy used by the abdominal muscles may not be fat from the abdominal region.
It’s possible that the energy used to perform an ab crunch may come from fat stores in your arms!
