You’ve seen companies on TV tell you that all you need is a quick 2-3 minutes a day doing some ab workout gimmick and you’ll get flat abs in 2 weeks, right?
How many of those ab “gimmicks” have you bought?
How long did you use them?
If you’ve bought any of these gadgets, you’ve probably realized by now that the commercial that sold you was borderline false advertising.
But there are some things you can do without any equipment at all to get toned sexy abs and a flat stomach, starting right now.
1) Increase your intensity – I don’t mean do more ab crunches or sit ups, I mean make the exercise more difficult.
2) Use Resistance – Rather than pounding out ab crunches or situps on the ground, pick up something that weighs 5-10 pounds to increase the difficulty.
3) Lower the reps – Doing 20-30 or even 100 ab crunches in a workout is a waste of time. You just get really good at doing a lot of situps. Lower the reps to allow for greater resistance.
The objective of your ab workouts is to stimulate your abdominal muscles to become stronger and more dense. This is what will give you sexy six pack abs once you achieve low levels of body fat.
To truly get six pack abs and flatten your belly, you don’t need to be perfect in everything you do, you only need to be mediocre in 3 main things:
Nutrition – In a perfect world you can eat chicken and broccoli for every meal, even breakfast. But the fact of the matter is, this isn’t a perfect world. If you get 75% of your diet right each day, you’ll be sitting pretty in just a few short months.
Weight Training – I use this term loosely. You don’t have to train with weights, but you need to get some sort of resistance exercise that goes above and beyond what a normal day usually entails. Maybe it’s two 45 minute workouts per week and one 20 minute workout. Maybe it’s four 20 minute workouts. It doesn’t matter in the whole scheme of things as long as it’s outside of your normal daily activity.
Cardio Training – This one is a doozy. You can actually lose fat and get sexy abs without doing cardio at all, but it does help burn fat if you have the time. I’d recommend some form of cardio training at least 2 days per week to speed it up. Like I said earlier, it doesn’t have to be perfect, just mediocre. Maybe it’s two 30 minute cardio sessions one week, and four forty minute sessions the next. One workout can be interval training and the next can be slow steady cardio. It can and should vary constantly. Keeping it varied will prevent your body from adapting, and keep you from getting bored.
So the key is to be at the very least mediocre at all three of these aspects of the program. You don’t have to go out and kill it at every workout. You don’t need to do cardio every single day. You don’t need chicken breast and broccoli at every meal. You just need to get out and get moving.