What was the best way you got your abs in shape?

Question

Like the ab lounge, or other products like that... are they worth purchasing? I have an ab ball already, just wondered if there is anything out there better, or maybe I should be doing more reps?

Answer 1

On Yahoo!Answers I find the same questions being asked repeatedly. A couple of common question amounts to "How do I lose weight," or more specifically, "How do I lose abdominal fat?" I have gotten very positive responses from my answers when I paused to reply (and now beginning to get "It works!" emails that are very gratifying. I like helping people)... so have recently decided to put a good solid answer on my Yahoo!360 Blog (September 10) that I can point people to. These are my thoughts as a physician and athlete.

Don't target losing more than about 2 lbs per week. If you try to lose faster, your body will go into "starvation mode" and get very stingy about burning calories while at the same time very efficient about storing any calories that you do provide. And it will make you feel awful.

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.

To lose a pound of fat, you need to eliminate about 3500 calories. You can do this by burning more with exercise or by modifying your diet to reduce intake. If you do a Google search on say, "swimming calories" you will quickly find a website with tables of calories burned for a given exercise. You can use such lists to estimate how many calories you are burning up with your routine.

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 work 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

Two things get my abs ripped: 1.) Low body fat percentage 2.) A good ab routine with variety.

1.) First of all, you could do 1000 situps every day and never see your abs if you're carrying too much body fat. Lose the fat, see the abs! For most women, you probably won't see your abs until you get below 21% body fat. For that super ripped fitness-model look, you're gonna need to be about 14%-16%, which takes a lot of will-power and dedication unless you're genetically gifted. If you're genetically predisposed to storing most of your fat in the stomach area, you've got your work cut out for you. (These people will only see there abs if they drop their body fat very low- fat in the stomach area is the last to come off for these people.)

2.) You're going to need an ab routine with variety- there is no one single machine, device, or exercise that is going to achieve the ultimate abs! Ab routines can be tailored to fit the individual, and should be changed up every couple of weeks. There are a myriad of exercises out there, but if you need help constructing a personal routine you can go to my fitness blog : http://thefitness411.blogspot.com/ and ask me there- I'll post something good for you! I change my ab routines a lot, but here is one of my personal ab routines:

*6 sets of leg lifts, hanging or on roman chair
*4 sets of rolling planks to a curl-up on the ab ball
*4 sets of straight sit-ups on ab ball
*2 sets of twisting sit-ups on ab ball
*3 sets of suspended core twists
*3 sets of weighted crunches on ab machine at the gym
*2-3 sets of standing medicine ball work

Now, you may not need as many sets as I do. (I've been training for a long time and my goals may be different.) As far as equipment goes, you've already got one of the best devices avaiable for abs! There are many ab exercises you can do with those and I can tell you first hand that it will bring out the definition you are looking for. Ab wheels are also fantastic for developing core strength. Most of the other stuff is crap, but the ab roller may be good for people who often strain their necks during crunches. Hope this helps!

Answer 3

I have an ab-lounger. And I use it at least 3 times a week, and I think it works great.

Answer 4

"bodybyjake" ab scissor is what i use it's pretty good but,i think it's limited so i will probably get an ab lounge i know someone who has it and she swears by it,so we'll see.(watch the fats and sugar).

Answer 5

no need for fancy ab toning gadgets. just the good old sit-ups do the trick.

Answer 6

swimming is great for the abs.