Is it true that if you do crunches/situps your stomach will look bigger cause of the fat on top of the muscle?

Answer 1

It depends on your form in doing the exercises. Here are some general thoughts and specifics for abs from my Yahoo!360 Blog September 10.

There is no site specific way of losing fat... the old myth about working your abs to burn belly fat isn't true. To get rid of love handles, you need to lose overall fat. That happens with exercise and watching your diet. More on that below.

The most effective way to lose fat is aerobic exercise in the "moderate" fat-burning range, ideally first thing in the morning before you eat. When you wake your body is ready to burn fat and your levels of growth hormone are highest at that time. Later in the day it can take up to 30 minutes just to put your body into a fat-burning mode.

Another overlooked way to burn fat is by lifting weights. Skeletal muscle has very high caloric needs... almost twice that of adipose (fat) tissue. Put on a little muscle and you will burn calories all day even at rest. Be aware that skeletal muscle weighs more, so with this approach you may see your weight increasing while your body fat is melting away. Not realizing this often stresses folks who think they should be losing weight as a measure of fitness. Forget the scale, look in the mirror and you will be happy.

For diet, keep a diary for a couple of weeks counting calories, grams of protein, and grams of fat intake. It is easy with online sources of nutritional information (type the name of the food and calories into the Google search engine) and packaging labels. That will let you quickly figure out where the fat is coming from in your diet.

Fat gives you 9 calories per gram. So take the number of grams of fat, multiply by 9, then calculate what percentage the fat calories are of your total daily calories. Restricting the calories from fat to about 20% of your total intake is ideal for a maintenance diet... that isn't overly restrictive. Of note, you need some fat in your diet. For instance, the body uses fat to produce hormones. Once you have a picture of how to modify your diet, you can drop the diary and just go back to it occasionally if you are wanting to tweek things further.

There is a subset of questions that goes further and asks about "How to get a six-pack?" The answer is the same. Six-packs are 20% abdominal exercise and 80% diet. There is one caveat... abdominal muscles will form in the position that you exercise them, so be certain to pull them tightly toward your spine while doing crunches, etc. Also, during most lifting, the "core is active" which means that you should be stabilizing with contracted abs then too. Fail to do this and the abs will form, but bulging outward and the result is not attractive.

If you are trying to build muscle as a way to lose fat, then you may need to increase total calories and specifically your protein intake. I target about 0.8 g of protein per pound of body weight each day when actively building. That is far more protein than most people need in their diets.


Aloha

Answer 2

Depends on how you go about doing crunches/situps. If you do few crunches with weights you will build muscle, which will make your stomach look bigger given that there is some fat on the abs. If you do many many crunches without weights you will build strength and more slender look. So it depends on your body fat how close to the 6-pack you come. I suggest you do lots of cardio, watch your diet, and continue the crunches with high reps. Like this:

Change your lifestyle and do this forever. Drink lots of water, walk an hour every day and crunches - except 1 then do stretching and upper body toning. Eat fruits & vegetables.

No sugar
No sodas
No candy
No chips
No potatoes
No pasta
No pizza
no corn
no bread
no burgers
no fried foods

Good Luck

Answer 3

Nope. But you are building those muscles with any of those isolating excercises, so your core can begin to thicken. the only way to really slim your corre and define those muscles is to combine the sit-ups/ crunches with lots of cardio and low fat diet.

Answer 4

Yes in the beginning but if you keep it up and start burning off the fat it will shrink. Remember not everyone can have six pack abs though....

Answer 5

if you exercise enough you will lose the fat.

Answer 6

absolutely wrong, Army soldiers do it everyday

Answer 7

That's exactly what happened to me.