Which is a better way to tone my abs?

Question

30 sessions of a pilates class OR 30 sessions of a yoga class?

Answer 1

I've done both and now continue Yoga as part of my routine. Both are excellent. I think of yoga as being more of a full-body workout with emphasis on flexibility and balance. Pilates is more purely about core strength (abs and back). Neither is going to give you great abs, you'll have to do some additional work. Here are some suggestions.


On Yahoo!Answers I find certain questions being asked repeatedly which is simply a reflection of new people participating. A couple of common questions amount 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

Yoga and Pilates both will help tone and strengthen your core. They both have common elements, too. I'd suggest choosing the class you like best. Exercise only works if you DO it, so choose the one you think is more fun. You will be consistant with it and actually do it if you're enjoying it.

Answer 3

Neither

Hi,
I've tried all different diets, and the weight loss is only temporary. I finally tried diet pills on the market are made from Hoodia. I saw this stuff on ABC News. It's all natural and safe, and it works! My wife took it for a month and dropped 20 pounds. I took it for a month and lost about 13 (but I didn't exercise).

I bought the natural hoodia from this website: http://www.alllsite.info/free-diet-pills.php . I checked the web site address so I can post it here and I saw they're running a promotion now to get a free 2 week sample for only $4.97! I'm going to order this supply for my wife and give it to her for Christmas =)

Answer 4

pialtes...yoga is basicly just stretching...it will make you more flexable and speritually more healthy, but winzer pilates will give you verry defigned femaine muscles, like those of a dancer

Answer 5

first, to be able to have "toned" muscular tissues you have to lose fats. do that via aerobic excercise AND vitamin. no longer one or the opposite, BOTH. you need to have a low frame fats % so as fo rmuscles to "exhibit up." if you're muscular and desire to preserve the ones muscular tissues you're going to have to preserve up your weight coaching AND comprise aerobic into your workours. you need to comprehend there's no such factor as "specific" fats loss. So, you are not able to do sit down americaand assume to drop some pounds/dimension in simply your belly, you're going to have weight reduction in every single place. it varies from individual to individual. for illustration, whilst i first set to work out i misplaced fats first in particular in my shoulders and again. it can be specific for you. the abs need to be dealt with identical to some other muscle institution. in different phrases: you must no longer excercise most effective your abs. you want a balanced application. as for special excercises w/ your apparatus, check out those: do crunches even as laying at the ball. begin with approximately five units of 15 you'll additionally do many conventional "bench" excercises at the ball equivalent to dumbell flys and dumbell bench. additionally, you'll check out shoulder presses even as sitting at the ball. all of those excercises would require you to stabilize your center muscular tissues so that you dont fall off. make certain to make use of mild weights and a prime rep rely (12-20) if you happen to desire "toned" muscular tissues

Answer 6

I"ll say the pilates.

Answer 7

Military style flutter kicks; I did these during my specops training in the military. You can lay on your back and lift your arms and legs and do the movement in a scissor movement rapidly; or if you have a friend in the service ask them about it.

Answer 8

pilates

Answer 9

Hi, if you are having difficulty, please try downloading my free report which details many abdominal workouts and exercises and explains how you can lose stomach fat in as little as 10 days.

Download it from http://www.firmupyourabs.com

Thanks a lot, James

Answer 10

do sit ups