Saturday, January 3, 2009

Are Crunches Bad For Six Pack Abs

By Jose Loni

The truth about crunches! We all seek answers to achieving ripped abs. The truth about crunches is that they are good for our abdominal muscles, but they will not give you the ripped abs that you want. To get ripped abs, you need to work on fat burning exercises that will burn overall fat, watching what we eat and eliminating stress from our lives.

Doing crunches may be stopping you from getting six pack abs because it doesn't focus on what needs to be trained. Crunches strengthen, stabilize and develop the abdominal area. But to get six pack abs, we need to focus on overall fat burning.

Fat burning exercises consist of overall exercises that increase our metabolism to further burn body fat. When we increase our metabolism, our bodies utilize the excess body fat in our stomach area, which allows the underlying abdominal muscles to become more visible.

Lean body mass is increased as a result of resistance training. The increased muscle mass increases metabolic activity and helps the body burn more fat, which is required to fuel increased activity.

Watching what we eat is also an important aspect of achieving six pack abs. By increasing the frequency of our meals to 5-6 per day and reducing the portions of each meal, we allow our body to maintain our energy levels throughout the day and maintain our blood sugar. Being aware of eating foods, which consist of carbohydrates, fat, minerals, vitamins and proteins will help us get our six-pack abs.

Stress has a way of counteracting our efforts. With increased stress, Cortisol is released and causes the body to store more fat in the abdominal area. The fat is stored there to help prepare the body for an emergency situation.

There are activities that are effective in reducing our stress. Activities like yoga, tai chi and deep breathing have all been shown to decrease stress in people.

Crunches, in truth, are good for you but to achieve defined ripped abs, we need to understand we need to focus on other factors. Activities like resistance training, watching what we eat and eliminating stress from our lives, will help us achieve our ripped six-pack abs. - 16003

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