The great “abs” myth
The truth behind the washboard stomach
The story goes like this. Perform endless sit-ups or crunches and your reward will be a Hollywood-style washboard stomach. All mostly myth, I’m afraid.
Your abdominals or “abs” run from the fifth rib through to your pelvis. The abdominals are six muscles contained within fibrous tissues. There are three on each side separated by the linea alba in the centre. When the rectus abdominus (or “abs”) contracts it pulls the attachments closer to each other, this is shown when we perform a crunch or sit-up.
However, no matter how much work you do on your abdominals, you will not magically develop an amazing “six-pack” or “washboard” stomach unless you clear away the layers of fat obscuring the muscles.
Here’s why. Doing lots of repetitions of common abdominal exercises only exercises those muscles in the same way as any other muscle in the body. It makes them bigger and stronger over time. However, if you want to see those abdominal muscles tight and lean like the best athletes in the world and Hollywood movie stars with their personal trainers, you need to shed weight. That’s right, weight loss.
You should also know that it is not physically possible to determine where your body will burn fat (this is often called “spot reduction”). The body will take fuel from fat stores randomly. When you perform an aerobic, or huffy-puffy, exercise your body burns fuel which it gets from its fat stores, burning calories. We are unable to choose which fat stores the body uses and in which order. Fat is lost throughout the body in a pattern dependent upon your genetics, sex and age. This is why we all lose fat in different areas of the body first.
As such, doing a thousand sit-ups, which can be considered aerobic (although it’s more like anaerobic or weight training), may burn some fat, but it won’t necessarily burn it away from the mid section giving you thumping abdominals.
So to get great abs you need to lose weight and clear your layers of fat. To do this you are far better off doing more efficient fat-burning aerobic exercises like running (treadmill), cross-country skiing (cross trainer) or riding (bike). These exercises use far more muscle groups, and the body burns larger amounts of calories to maintain the aerobic activity at a high level for longer periods of time.
Let’s use the cross-country skiing example. A 90 kilogramme person skiing on the cross trainer can burn approximately 200 calories in 10 minutes. This is highly aerobic, great for blood flow, and strengthens the heart.
Now, if the same-sized person did any of the common abdominal exercises like crunches and sit-ups, with or without resistance, they would burn approximately 40 to 45 calories every 10 minutes. The exercise is more anaerobic and designed to strengthen your core muscles, which is great, but it won’t get you the “six-pack”. It would take almost 50 minutes of abdominal crunches to burn the same amount of calories as 10 minutes of skiing would, and as we have determined, you need to burn that fat off to get that “six-pack”.
So forget about all those hundreds of abdominal crunches for great “abs”. Yes, they are good for strengthening core muscles, but not hundreds of repetitions worth. The only way to truly lean up your midsection and show great stomach muscles is to lean up your whole body with a combination of strength training, proper diet and lots of aerobic exercise.
So when thinking sexy stomach this summer, pick the highly aerobic exercises first and lean up! ?
