When you reach “middle age”, your middle will shout out that fact, especially if you don’t watch what you eat and you don’t bother to exercise. Inevitably the flat tummy is gone. For those who already spot a tummy or a pot-belly, you’ll know that it’s a Herculean effort to even lose a millimeter of the fats accumulated there.
Hopefully, these 6 steps extracted from Sara Ost’s post will help achieve a toned torso quickly.
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- Forget about sit-ups! You can ignore isolated exercises like sit up and crunches if they had never worked for you. Did you know Navy SEALs and professional athletes never do a single sit-up and shun crunches? According to Sara Ost, some military training guides actually discourage isolated abdominal exercises.
While isolated movements can tone individual muscle groups, for true core fitness, it’s better to do integrated exercises that strengthen your entire body – with defined abs being the happy side effect. Point 5 will explain this further, but two simple, highly-effective integrative exercises you can try are the standing weighted arm lift and the hot potato.
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- Lose weight first.
All fitness gurus will emphasize on stomach exercises, and there are lots of sexy abs infomercials on the TV.
- Lose weight first.
Save your money. Until you drop excess pounds, you simply won’t see your abs, whatever their state of fitness. (Yes, your abs – everyone has a natural six-pack under there somewhere!) Lose weight and your abs will show up quite nicely, even if you never do a single sit-up. Men generally need to maintain about 8-14% body fat; women should add 10 to that.
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- Reduce empty calories.
We don’t need empty calories. Empty calories can lead to irritability, headaches, cravings, mood swings, and possible nutritional deficiencies.
- Reduce empty calories.
Cutting empty carbohydrates and sugars out of your life will not only trim your middle; you’ll reduce your risk of diabetes, too. That said, I don’t think you have to become a bloodthirsty carnivore or suffer on low-carb beer for the rest of your life. That’s an approach that is certainly immoderate and definitely not healthy. But do cut back on refined, worthless calories from cakes, cookies, pastries, crackers, chips, big bowls of pasta, and white bread.
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- Get rid of liquid calories.
We love our cokes and sodas but they are basically sugared drinks. Beware of freshly squeezed fruits with added sugar solution added in whenever you ordered from your favourite cafe.
- Get rid of liquid calories.
And while it’s commonly accepted that juice is healthy, I suggest cutting back. Even 100% juice is still going to spike your blood sugar. A real piece of fruit provides fiber and fills you up; juice just gives you extra calories you don’t need.
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- Take up integrative exercise system. Exercise help in our overall health and not just our abs. So why not do it?
What do I mean by an “integrative” exercise system? Anything that incorporates resistance, stretching and weight-bearing movement. Excellent choices are yoga, pilates, the Bar Method, martial arts, dance, boot camp classes, and any sports. I’ve had great personal success with yoga; after shedding the excess tummy pudge, it only took a few weeks of yoga for the abs to peek out. Furthermore, an integrative exercise program elongates your muscles, lubricates your joints, and releases the pressure that compacts your vertebral column. Better posture = better abs.
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- Reduce stress, balance hormones.
Our hormones have a direct relationship to immunity, metabolism, and much more. And stress is a very sure way to disrupt healthy hormone regulation.
It’s so important to find a way to reduce and manage any stress in your life (again with that yoga!). However you choose to handle stress, don’t shirk this aspect of weight management and health. Your abs are depending on you!
What Sara Ost had shared is sensible and logical. However, There are many routes to Rome, and you might also want to check out Mike Geary’s The Truth about Six-Pack abs. Over at his website, Mike Geary listed 5 facts on losing belly fat and invite men and women to separate section to find out how they can gain a flat tummy successfully without doing crunch and sit-up or cardio exercises.
Get Your Flat Abs Equipment Here! (As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases)
Additional Reading:
Fat Loss for Idiots
The Advanced Guide to Fast Weight Loss for Busy Women
Burn the Fats Feed the Muscles
Fat Loss Secrets
[tags]flatten abs, weight loss, trimmed abs, six-pack abs, pot belly, lose tummy[/tags]
All good tips to which I’d add the best kept secret. Get a dog! With a dog you’ve got daily motivation to get out and run, jog or bike. If you don’t do your daily exercise a dog will put you on a guilt trip that will make you keep moving.
This article is cool except for one point. The navy seals DO situps in their conditioning program: http://sportsmedicine.about.com/cs/conditioning/a/012204.htm
Wow! Dogs, Seals and Abs! I really gotta get going on liberating my abs to the world!
This was a good post and offers common sense advice.
very good advise sara ost, however as an ex navy seal we had to do 1000 sit ups per day..
WHAT DO I DO TO LOOSE 40 LBS ?
Great ideas but you forgot about a major factor to preventing getting a flat stomach…. parasites…
If you have been carrying a parasite around for say 10 or 20 years ago, as a result of having continual inflammation in the gut, the muscles of the abdominal area such as the deep abdominal wall (TVA) become dysfunctional. As Paul Chek says in his “Eat, Move and be Healthy book… “Internal organs borrow their pain-sensitive nerve fibers from the muscular system. That means that when an organ is in pain, the brain can’t determine if it’s the muscle or the organ that hurts…since pain always weakens muscles, the abdominal muscles generally lose tone and don’t respond to exercise like a muscle that doesn’t think it is in pain” So as a result of the continual inflammation and discomfort the muscles essentially switch off which is known as lower abdominal amnesia. As a result it is difficult to achieve a flat stomach whilst having a parasite present.
Taken from my article “parasites… a flat stomach’s worst enemy”
http://www.samanthathoms.com
cut off your head to loose 40 lbs
ha ha ha! whatever works for you, Brass! 🙂 wish I could just slough it all off, that’s the truth!
For christmas I got two 3 pound weights.. I use them every day for 10 minutes, I have flat beautiful abs now.. My Point? anyone can do it!
plase support me, http://www.starrsearch.net
one correction. pasta was listed as one of the empty calorie food sources to avoid. pasta is one of the best sources of carbohydrate you can eat to lose weight according to the glycemic index. by contrast potatoes and beets are high on the glycemic index and cause higher spikes in blood sugar (resulting in greater conversion to fat) foods low on the glycemic index (pasta is one of the lowest) create a much longer sustained burn and therefore do not trigger our natural mechanisms for calorie retention (as long as you are burning the calories).
some good ideas but slightly misleading. Nave Seals DO in fact do sit-ups. They do a TON of crunches, V’s and straight legs. SOME millitary manuals do indeed discourage isolated abs exercises but without TONING the muscles they won’t show through properly to give that ‘washboard’ 6 pack effect. YEAH you can loose weight and see an ab’s ‘shape’ but nothing too well defined wothout toning.
Finally, a post about proper exercise and nutrition. Usually articles like this are about 6 different ab exercises. Great post.
Thanks for sharing such a informative post as you have listed all the points which plays an important role in sustainable weight loss.As its very true that fit body can always boost your confidence level.