Before You Start an Ab Workout Routine

Before starting a core exercise program, you should establish if your primary goal is to trim abdominal fat or strengthen and tone your abdominal muscles. Instead of focusing on “How to get a six pack”, your time might be better devoted to “How to lose belly fat”. One fact to help you decide this is: if your body fat percentage is 10-12% for a male or 13 to 15% for a female (optimum percentages), an ab workout with some effective ab exercises should bring results in a relatively short period of time. However, if your body fat does not fall within these optimum percentages, you will have to maintain a caloric deficit to supplement your ab workouts. A caloric deficit can only be achieved by burning more calories than consumed in a day.

How to Lose Belly Fat

Abdominal exercise is an absolute necessity for toning and tightening your abs. However, performing ab exercises is effective at building ab muscle – but does not represent the most effective way to burn calories. Why? Because the abs are a very small muscle group. Calories are burned by getting the heart rate up. The most effective way to get the heart rate up is by exercising the larger muscle groups or getting active in some cardiovascular activity such as walking, jogging, swimming, tennis or aerobic exercise. Hence, the best program to trim your mid-section is not necessarily by mastering the best ab workout routine, but what you do in between your ab workout routines – watching your diet and burning calories. Your abs workout should include an exercise such as the squat. The squat exercise performed with weights is considered an excellent exercise because larger muscle groups are engaged which gives the potential to burn a tremendous amount of calories. The squat exercise involves the quadriceps (thighs), the spinal erectors (back muscles), the hamstrings (back of the thighs) and the buttocks.

To Get a Six Pack, Cardiovascular Exercise Is Vital

To get six pack abs, you will need to combine a cardiovascular workout of medium intensity with some core exercises. Before you begin with an anaerobic workout, you will need to burn off fat and warm-up, the goal should be for you to work hard enough to sweat for 25-40 minutes. This can be anything from a 4 mile run to using a rowing machine. It doesn’t have to be specific to upper or lower body but simply to get the heart rate up. The intensity doesn’t need to be too extreme, overall it needs to be sustainable enough for you to carry out these activities 4-5 times a week. Intensity can also be mixed; for example, some days you could go for a gentle hour long jog, whilst on other days you could hit the cross-trainer hard.

Vary Your Ab Workouts

By far the best ab workouts are those that incorporate different exercises. For example v-sit-ups and squats. These will work different areas of the abdominals’ harder than sit-ups will. As you become fitter you will be able to develop your own ab workout routine containing different ab exercises as well as other exercises into your workout such as shuttle runs, push-ups and even free weights. It’s even possible to cut out other forms of endurance exercise such as jogging or swimming and to use only circuit training to maintain over-all body strength and general fitness provided you are fit enough to keep up the intensity for a reasonably long period of time. An ideal abs specific circuit workout would contain exercises such as sit-ups, squat-thrusts and v-sit-ups in repetitions of 15-20 with shuttle runs in between each exercise for a duration of around 30-40 minutes. This is an ideal workout that does not involve any equipment.