Have you been religiously doing your abdominal muscle exercises? Is your abs showing to your satisfaction? No? Why? Do you know that your abdominal muscle is one of the easiest muscles to build but yet why is it that most people have difficulty in developing that 6 pack abs?
Here is the truth. Those of you who are working out your abs regularly do probably own that much sought after six pack. Yes, you do. The only trouble is that your belly fat is covering them. Your abs will not show up well if you have a body fat ratio of more than 12%. The more fat you burn off, the more defined your abs will be. You will own that rippling washboard abs when your body fat is 10% or less. So if you have fat on your belly, forget about abdominal exercises and burn off the fats first.
There is another reason why people put in so much effort to develop their abdominal muscle and yet their abs are not showing although they have low body fat. Again, there is a simple explanation. They are doing the wrong exercises and working out in bad form.
Let's take for example the most common abs exercises, the sit up and the leg raisers. Everybody seem to be doing these two exercises not knowing that these exercises really don't do much for their abs. Don't believe me? Ok…try this. When you do your sit up or leg raisers, place your palms on your hip on the area connecting to your thigh and perform the exercises. Tell me what did you feel? Ahhh….you are getting it. Those muscles there are doing most of the work. Those are your hip flexor muscles. Since your hip flexors are doing most of the work, how can you develop your abs effectively?
So you say, from now on I will do crunches instead. Well, I have another surprise for you. Most people perform their crunches wrongly too. Think about it. Why is the exercise called the "crunch"? It is because you must squeeze your abs so are that you are crunching them. In order to squeeze your abs hard, you have to curl up like a prawn and breath out all the air in your lungs at the top position and then squeeeeeeeze the muscles so hard that you feel a burn. That will take a few seconds to crunch out all the air before you lower to the beginning position again. You can't do this effectively if you just go up, down, up down, up down rhythmetically. So, if you have been doing hundreds of crunches everyday with minimal result, now you know why. In fact, it is almost impossible for the average guy to do tens of properly performed crunches and not to say hundreds of them. The same squeezing principle applies to other abs exercises.
Ok….now that you know why your abs are not showing up well, so get on with burning your fats and perform your workout in correct form. You will then see your 6 pack abdominal muscle in no time.
