Two things are true with your body: 1) Your abs become visible at 10% body fat or less for men, and around 18% or less for women; 2) Building quality muscle all-around and a good fitness constitution will raise your BMR.
OK, so what does that have to do with not working your abs to see them? I’ll tell you! First, most people believe that by doing hundreds of crunches and dozens of different ab exercises, their abs will become “ripped” and visible. While it’s true that such fitness behavior will cause hypertrophy of the abdominal muscles, such people forget that their ab visibility is affected by all around fitness and body fat percentage. Hence, most of them will never see their abs! I know, it’s a sad state of affairs in the fitness world - all that time in the gym and nothing to show for it.
Here are two tips which will lead you more closely to your goals, including ab flatness and even ab visibility:
- Write down what you’re eating and ensure you are getting 5 - 6 meals smaller meals per day, with less carbs and more quality proteins.
- Your abs are involved in just about every move you do, so ensure you have free weights in your exercise routine at least three times per week.
Regarding the latter, think about this. If you’ve doing a squat, not only are your quads, glutes, hamstrings and back muscles coming into play, but you are using your abs to stabilize. If you’re doing tricep pushdowns, your abs are keeping your spine from bending backwards. Even on a flat bench press, your abs have some involvement.
Go ahead and do those crunches, but reduce them dramatically and focus on all of the other muscle-building exercises which contribute to greater musculariy, hence a better BMR, and ultimately, more visible abs due to less body fat. Remember that for every pound of muscle you gain, your body can burn an extra 50 calories!
