Two hundred and seven million dollars, this is the amount of money that was spent last year on abdominal exercise equipment sold through infomercials. Aside from the fact that a few wealthy marketers are cleaning up big time on the sweat and dreams of all the sculpted out hopefuls out there, this tells us one thing; six-pack abs are in a high demand. It is no secret and virtually every single person out there, even those who are not involved in body building and fitness desire a flat, tight and well-defined midsection. Six-pack abs are at the top on most people’s list of priorities in the gym and everyone seems to be on a mission to get them. How do most people go about this? They perform endless sets of sit-ups and crunches, training their abs three, four or even more times in a gym per week slaving away on sets of 50-100 reps or more, they pop up their thermogenic fat loss pills and then they wait for the results to come.
Unfortunately, for the vast majority of trainees, those results never show up in any significant form. Why? It is because almost everyone out there is structuring their six-packed abs program based on a false premise. And that false premise is the myth of spot reduction.
The spot reduction myth is one of the most common misconceptions in the entire fitness industry and results in endless hours of wasted training time around the world. Simply put, spot reduction implies that it is possible to target fat loss from specific areas of the body by training them with resistance. For example, spot reduction would imply that training your biceps with weights will burn fat off of your bicep area or that training your chest with weights will burn fat off of your chest area. The truth is that this notion of targeting fat loss from specific areas of the body is down right false, illogical and untrue.
Let me clear this up once and for all. You cannot target fat loss from a specific are of your body. Let me repeat that gin because it is so important, you cannot target fat loss from a specific area of your body. When you train your body with weights, all you are doing is stimulating then specific muscle groups involved in the movement, but this stimulation has no affect on the stored body fat in and around that particular area. Fat loss only occurs on a holistic level. In other words, when the body is stimulated to burn fat through a proper diet and cardiovascular exercise, it will burn fat from the entire body as a whole. You have no control over this and there is no way to stimulate fat to be burned from specific areas of the body by training them with weights.
So what is all this have to do with achieving six-packed abs? Everything. You see everyone already has a six-packed. The problem is that for most people, it is simply hidden underneath a layer of fat. This layer of fat causes the midsection to appear soft, smooth and protrusive. However, underneath that layer of fat are the abdominal muscles. And causing these muscles to appear flat, defined and separated is a simple matter of removing or more accurately, significantly decreasing the layer of fats sitting on top of them as well as the layer of fat behind them surrounding the internal organs. The layer of fat lying on top is known as subcutaneous fat, that is the fat directly underneath the skin. And the layer of fat behind them is known as visceral fat. That is the fat that surrounds the internal organs.
Since spot reduction is flood of impossible and since there is no way to specifically target abdominal fat through exercise, we can conclude that carving out six-packed abs has very little to do with the specific abs exercises that you perform. Rather, achieving a set of flat, sculpted and defined six-packed abs is for the most part, a simple product of your bottom line body fat percentage.
If you are following a sensible weight training and cardio routine and a proper fat loss diet that focuses on burning fat from your entire body, flat and defined abdominals are just one of the many things that come with it. On the other, if your overall body fat levels are too
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