How to Get Six Pack Abs

Who doesn’t want a nice washboard stomach? Almost everyone desires flat, sexy, six pack abs and sales of special abdominal workout equipment is exploding. People spend millions every year on all kinds of useless gimmicks to get the perfect six pack abs. All for nothing.

Why? Because doing sit-ups or any kind of ab exercise will not change the way your stomach looks. Go ahead – do a thousand sit-ups and find out. You will have strong stomach muscles, but probably look the same – worse, you may actually look fatter since the new muscle you created will push out your stomach.

Don’t waste time doing ANY kind of ab exercises if you want a flat stomach – concentrate on lowering your body fat percentage instead. You’ll need to get below 10% before you really start to see the stomach muscles.

But what about abdominal exercises? Why are they so recommended and what benefit will I receive by doing them?

The benefits are many. The most important reason to have strong stomach muscle is to aid the spine in keeping your body erect. Without strong stomach muscles, the spine tends to take too much load leading to back problems.

Having abdominal strength will also help you in sports. Since your abs are the center of your body, they are often worked very hard during any kind of competitive sport. This explains why almost all sports training regimes include some kind of abdominal exercise.

It used to be common knowledge that you needed to work your abs everyday and as much as possible to get a flat stomach. Then people started realizing that this only worked for people who were naturally low in body fat. The rest of us just got firm, fat-looking stomachs.

Now, exercise experts all agree that the abdominal muscles are the same as any other small muscle group. They benefit from workouts once a week and it’s not necessary to do a million sit-ups.

In fact, sit-ups are no longer recommended to anyone for two reasons:

You can do a modified sit-up - effective in isolating your abs - by going up only half way and making sure your low back does not leave the floor.

But if you lift weights or do resistance exercise, one ab workout per week is plenty.

You want to try working the three separate parts of the abs:

Each requires the right exercise. For the lower abdominals, leg raisers are the best. They really work the lower and middle abs.

There are many ways to do these and you can mix it up to get a more intense workout.

For starters, try lying on the floor face up and curl into a ball holding your knees to your chest. Rock back and forth a bit to get your low back rounded and in the correct position. Then, place your hands palm down on the floor under your butt and extend your legs. Keeping your back from arching as much as possible, lift your legs up 12 inches and lower them back almost to the floor but not touching. Repeat this slowly using 5-10 seconds for each rep. Stop when your low back starts to feel tight. Never keep working if your low back begins to hurt.

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