The Key to Great Looking Abs is not Crunches

One of the things that annoyed me greatly when I was training more people was the phrase, “let us do more abs.” Everyone always thinks that doing abs is going to flatten everything down. However, this is rarely ever the case. What is going to flatten the abs down is expending more energy than the person uses during a day.

There is a caveat to this though; the energy amount has to be 3600 calories to lose a pound of fat. It also is not healthy for that caloric expenditure to happen in one day. Therefore, a person has to be careful and use smart planning. A person can get to this caloric amount in a couple of ways. The first way is diet. The other way is through movement or exercise. Of course, you can combine the two to get results, which is usually the best course of action. It is far too difficult to try and get to the right caloric level through one of those techniques alone. Both techniques will allow a person to have a balanced life, instead of a tortured existence based on the rules of slavery to a certain type of training or dieting.

What you get by training “more abs” is abs with muscular endurance, or big abs that stick out. A lot of females do not realize this, but that is what they really are training to get. By asking for more work for your abs, then you are asking for muscular endurance, muscular strength, or muscular hypertrophy (or growth). Working the abs over and over will not necessary make the tummy fat go away.

The Doctor in Doctor Who (Episode 6.2) said it best, “Safe? No, of course you are not safe. There are about a billion other things out there just waiting to burn your whole world. But, if you want to pretend you're safe just so you can sleep at night, okay. You're safe. But you're not really.”

He was talking about saving the world and here we are talking about losing weight and getting a flat tummy. However, what I could say is, “Flat tummy with crunches or sit ups? No, course it won’t work. There’s about a billion of other things that are making you fat. But, if you want to do crunches and pretend, you’re getting a flat tummy so you can sleep at night, okay. You are getting a flat tummy… But you’re not really.”

Whatever the case, if it makes you feel better to do abs and believe that you are flattening out your tummy, then fine do abs. Just do not expect it to do what you want it to do because it is not going to work. You will be sorely disappointed and you might even injure your lower back because of muscle imbalances. Therefore, you should always focus on doing the things that will remove the fat from obscuring your abs like dieting and exercising with a caloric goal in mind. If you can do that with the help of a medical professional (to make sure that everything you are doing is safe), then you are sure to obtain the fat loss you want.