Thursday, January 15, 2009

Are Crunches Bad For Six Pack Abs

By Jose Loni

Lately, the controversial question is, are crunches bad for six pack abs. No, they are not bad for six pack abs, but if your goal is to attain visible six-pack abs, then you need to focus on other aspects of exercise and diet. Concentrating on resistance exercises that increase our metabolism to burn fat, monitoring our diet and reducing the amount of stress in 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.

Overall fat burning exercises are activities that allow us to train our whole body to increase our metabolism. By increasing our metabolism, we are better able to burn fat and utilize the excess belly fat, which results in more visibility of the abdominal muscles.

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.

We should decrease the amount of stress we have in our lives. Stress makes our body release a hormone called Cortisol and causes the body to be in an emergency-readiness situation. When this occurs our body stores fat in the stomach to prepare for an emergency situation.

There are several ways to decrease the amount of stress in our lives. Activities like deep breathing, tai chi, and yoga, have ways of calming the body down and help to reduce stress.

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. - 16463

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