The BEST way to lose that tummy, shrink your waist, and look more defined is NOT by doing ab exercises. The number of minutes spent on abdominal exercises (either 5, 50, or 500) per week NO shrink your stomach – period!
- The abdominal muscles are there.
- Fat NEVER turns into muscle
Muscle being built and lost is a whole different entity besides gaining and losing fat. To gain muscle, you do resistance training (ie abdominal exercises) and make sure you have nutrition to fuel growing muscles. This is a great plan to grow any muscle.
BUT, to lose fat (no bodybuilder built enough lower back and abdominal muscle to reach a 40-inch waist, so yeah, it’s mostly all fat), you need to burn the fat. The way to do it is not through resistance training. Have you ever seen the strongest men in world competitions? Most of them look fat, but with a lot of muscle underneath the fat. That’s what you’re doing with your ab exercises, just building the muscle under all that FAT.
To lose fat, you need to do two things:
- Create a calorie deficit
- Burn calories
Relying solely on diet will simply shrink your entire body, including your muscles. The worst of all the side effects of the simple diet is slow metabolism! That’s why most Americans will gain 6-10 pounds of fat between Thanksgiving and New Years – their metabolism is SO low that their body will save anything that hits their stomach as fat because it’s in survival mode.
The best proven method to burn fat from your belly (and from your entire body, since we CANNOT reduce fat from our bellies… have you ever seen a six pack model with fat arms?)… is steady state aerobics.
- Jogging
- Elliptical
- stair master
- Swimming
- jump the rope
The calories burned doing crunches are probably the equivalent of curling two 12 oz dumbbells. cans of soda that many times (okay, maybe not, but you get the point). These fat-burning cardio activities should last no less than 30 minutes (you may have to push yourself to achieve this) and no more than 45 (sometimes 60) minutes. If 45 minutes is too easy, try harder.
Do cardio 4 times a week. If you are satisfied with the results, tap again 3 times. If you need more, do cardio 5-6 days a week. And if you’re SUPER serious and need to lose weight fast, the best way to double your fat loss is to double your cardio, but not in one session (you’d be burning more muscle than fat). That’s right, do a cardio session in the morning, say at 6:30am, for 30-45 minutes, then again at 6:30pm, for another 30-45 minutes. Don’t do this double cardio for too long (no more than 3-4 weeks) because it’s VERY hard on the body.
There you have it, the BEST way to lose that tummy, shrink your waist, and look more defined, without EVER doing crunches.