Focus On Your Diet
In order to burn fat and reveal your washboard, six pack abs, it is important to eat a balanced diet that is made up of protein, healthy fats, and some carbohydrates. Protein helps form the building blocks of muscle and is probably the most essential macronutrient of them all, mainly because your body burns a ton of calories digesting protein. Calculating the right amount of carbohydrates to eat can be tricky, but a good strategy to use is to eat most of your carbs post-workout. When you intake carbs post-workout your body quickly absorbs the carbs directly into the muscle tissue, promoting growth. Post-workout carbs also help your muscles recover faster, which will give you better results faster. Many people believe that eating fat will make you fat, but in reality, healthy polyunsaturated and monounsaturated fats such as fish oils, nuts, and olive oil will actually help you burn fatter than a low fat diet will. Dietary fat in your diet will help keep insulin levels stable, which will help prevent you from gaining additional body fat. The last diet tip is to include plenty of fiber and raw vegetables with each meal. Vegetables are jam packed with tons of fiber, antioxidants, vitamins, and minerals, which are all essential for building a lean body and ripped six pack abs.
Stop Doing Thousands of Crunches
Compound, multi-joint, total body movements will promote more total fat loss and promote a much bigger muscle building response than crunches and sit-ups ever will. Personally, I think that it is completely pointless to waste an hour of your time doing hundreds of useless crunches and sit-ups when that hour could be spent doing exercises that are more productive for fat loss. I generally work abs for about 15 to 20 minutes two or three times per week (p90x).There is just no reason to work abs any more than this!
Use Smarter Cardio Methods
I’m sure you’ve probably heard that the best way to burn fat is to do long duration cardio at a slow to medium pace. This fat loss method is decent, but there is a much better way. I suggest doing interval workouts combined with abdominal exercises. During the active recovery period of your interval workout, perform an ab exercise. For example, if you are doing interval sprints on a stationary bike or treadmill, run for 30 seconds at your maximum speed. Hop off the machine and immediately perform a set of 20 exercise ball crunches. Get back on the machine and crank it back up again. Repeat 5-8 times. You can throw in a variety of different ab exercises during this interval session such as reverse crunches, planks, etc.
