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Step 1
“You are what you eat!” Here is something you should live by: “abs are made in the kitchen.” Live it, learn it, love it. You need to start thinking healthy all of the time and there are many approaches to eating healthy but the main thing is that you need to start with the consumption of small, but very frequent meals along with plenty of cold water (not soda, not juice, but water) throughout the day. Eating more frequent meals speeds up your metabolism to extraordinary levels, which directly correlates to more calories being burnt and less fat covering your abs. Eating 2-3 heavy meals a day will attribute to fat storage as when you wait past 4 hours to eat, your body cannibalizes itself, breaking down its muscle to feed itself. Then, it notes to itself that you starved for that long, so it’s going to store onto any fat it has to provide energy for the day. Then what you usually do is stuff your face when that meal at dinnertime comes because you’ve waited so long to eat. You end up consuming a ton of calories per meal that gets stored to fat. So we can see how the buildup occurs. You eat breakfast and store fat because your body is trained to store it for energy because you won’t be fed for 6 hours. Even if you burned 90% of those calories throughout that time, you still have a net gain of bodyfat of 10% of those calories you consumed at breakfast. This occurs with each and every meal, where there is a buildup of bodyfat little by little. This all happens while your muscle breaks down, where you require less and less energy to sustain your physicality (the more muscle you have, the more energy is required to sustain the muscle mass, meaning you need to consume more calories to maintain yourself). Eventually your BMI is through the roof and you eventually become considered obese by your doctor.
However, this will not occur if and when you spread your meals out throughout the day into smaller meals. First and foremost, when consuming 6-7 frequent meals in a day, you actually consume less total calories throughout the day than if you ate 3 large meals. Why is this so? In the beginning stages, you don’t develop the hunger so you don’t overeat. You eat just enough. How does this contribute to fat burning? When eating every 2 hours, your body knows that food is coming readily so it says to itself: “I can burn this energy now and use it as readily available energy because I will be fed soon”. -
Step 2
Weightlifting is a Must! Anytime you spend in the gym must be done with the utmost intensity if you want to develop the physique you’ve always dreamed of. Read the article Get Down to Business so you know how to be motivated day in and day out to make your use of the gym most effective and efficient. While you are in the gym, make sure you do isolation exercises, but more importantly, the main focus of your workout should be of the incorporation of compound exercises like squats, deadlifts, power cleans, hang cleans, clean and jerks, dumbbell lunges, bench presses, etc.
Those that require multiple muscle groups will activate your entire body and torch bodyfat. You burn a tremendous amount of calories stabilizing both yourself and the weight, and considering that these exercises are where you are strongest, you will be supporting that much more weight than your own bodyweight. Additionally, your core is activated at all times when you do these movements. Bodybuilders rarely train their abs during the offseason, mainly because they have been worked so hard during these compound exercises that there is no immediate need to bring out any more detail than what they develop from these moves. Furthermore, anytime there is an option between choosing an exercise with a machine or free weights, choose the free weights.
Activation of your stabilizer muscles will take effect, including your core, and there will be a significant increase in the amount of calories expended throughout the exercise. Also, rather than sit when doing an exercise, make sure you stand. So instead of doing seated dumbbell curls, perform standing dumbbell curls. You burn a tremendous amount of more calories stabilizing yourself when standing upright than when seated. Think about it. You are supporting your own weight plus the weights you are holding, whereas when you sit, the bench is absorbing that extra poundage. Think critically when you are working out and really analyze the situation presented before you. Think to yourself: “Which exercises are going to provide the most benefit in terms of stimulation to my muscles and which are going to burn the most calories?”. Moreover, do not shy away from heavy weights. Deviate from the high rep ripped theory. It is a falsity and common misconception. Lifting heavy weights is going to activate more muscles and going to burn more calories than you can imagine. -
Step 3
Abs Are a Muscle: They Require Stimulation…You should really focus on resistance abdominal training a few days a week. In other words, you need to train intensely with heavy weight and resistance against your abs. Training your abs with heavy weight will enable your abs to grow and press up against your skin, making your abs stick out more. Doing hundreds of sit-ups or crunches does not equate to heavy resistance and thus, will be ineffective. Whether you like to believe it or not, your abs respond effectively better to heavier weights and lower reps than higher reps. So instead of doing your 100 sit-up routine (which if done properly with a slow and controlled motion while squeezing the muscle and holding the contraction at the top, even Jack LaLanne in his prime couldn’t do), make sure you implement a program that requires intense stimulation with weights. If done properly, you should only be able to do a few reps per exercise because of the intense burn you should feel. Try to shoot for circuit sets of slow reps, making sure to always contract and squeeze your abs throughout the session. To ensure adequate training (not too little and overdoing it), you should train abs 2-3 times a week intensely. The abs are a set of muscles that recovers quickly, but you don’t want to overdo it. Don’t train them day and night, or even every day. You don’t want to train them while they are still recovering. You wouldn’t train your chest that way, so I ask of you, why train your abs that way? Anything more than a few days a week, will run you into the risk of overtraining, which will hinder precious muscle growth. Follow the ab routines of the week to help provide you with routines to cut your midsection up.
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Step 4
Don’t Neglect the Cardio… You have to do cardiovascular training. It is a necessary part of this whole equation. Regardless of what you think in terms that weightlifting is enough, it really is not. Weight lifting is obviously a great way to build muscle, which is inherently going to cut the fat and speed up your metabolism, but in terms of burning calories, nothing beats an intense cardiovascular training session. Make sure you perform cardio 3-4 times a week, but only at 20 minutes a session. If you are training hard with weights, that should be a cardio session in itself (not doing a set, waiting 3 minutes, doing another set…I’m talking about performing 40 gut-wrenching sets containing heavy weight in under an hour). So when you focus on pure cardio, it should be of high intensity interval training sessions, where you mix up the intensities. Perform sprints combined with jogs to recover. For instance, sprint as hard as you can for 30 seconds, then jog for 45 seconds, then sprint again and so forth. You can also do like 80% of your max sprint for a minute, and then 40% of your max in the form of a run. The possibilities are endless. Your cardio sessions can be performed either directly in the morning (after consuming a protein shake with no carbs) or directly after your weight workout. These are the times when glycogen levels are low, so your body will resort more towards fat burning than using the energy from the food you consumed.
Also, if you have proper protein intake throughout the day, your muscle mass will be held onto. If you perform cardio in the morning, make sure you just have whey protein directly after to halt muscle breakdown and to continue the fat burning process, and then have a full meal an hour later. If you perform cardio directly after weightlifting, make sure you have whey protein with carbs directly after (disregarding the aforementioned cardio only rule where you just consume protein). -
Step 5
Put in Some Extra Effort… Move around a lot. Doing little tasks around the day where you are constantly active is going to help you burn off that extra fat. Doing things like the laundry, cleaning around the house, making the bed…those extra effort that it requires to do that stuff will burn a tremendous amount of calories throughout the day and will cut into your fat cells like you wouldn’t believe. Constantly fidgeting and moving burns up a tremendous amount of fat and will get your abs glimmering in no time.
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Step 6
Implement Proper Supplementation… You need to incorporate proper supplementation. Besides whey protein, get a multivitamin. This is going to help convert your food into energy and will help with the daily metabolic functions of life. Also, look to incorporate citrimax plus chromium picolinate. I’ve noticed tremendous results when taking this supplement before ingesting a large meal with lots of carbohydrates. It really leans me up. Just don’t overdo it. If you are going to take this, make sure you only take the recommended serving and don’t take it with every meal.
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Step 7
Stay Motivated… Best of luck on your endeavors to getting a ripped body. Stay motivated and keep your eye on the prize. It may not come overnight, but great things take time to develop. Stay focused and stay on track, because one day your abs will appear. When I was younger, I always used to justify to myself that abs were just not a part of my genetics and that they were too hard to develop (they were for skinny kids). However, with a great deal of work applied to the goal, I can now say I have developed a nice set of abs that others do envy. Soon, others will recognize your achievements and it will really grab their attention and by extension, provide you with a sense of pride and accomplishment.
http://www.muscleprodigy.com/
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muscleprodigy said
on 5/17/2009 http://www.muscleprodigy.com/