Why Doing Sit Ups Won't Give You A Six Pack

We've all seen the magazine models haven't we? Well defined wash board abs and slim waist lines. We look at them and wish that could be us. Then we head off to the gym and engage in a rigorous ab routine hoping that if we do enough sit ups we'll force our abs to look like the people on the magazine covers.

The truth about this is quite simple. Remember our bodies function as a unit. If we pick up weight, we don't just pick up weight around our bellies, our entire bodies get larger as we eat more calories than is necessary to maintain our body weight. Likewise, if you ask anyone who has lost a substantial amount of weight whether they lost in just one area or all over their bodies, I think you'll find pretty much the same answer.

The short answer to this question is the following: in order to see your abs you entire body fat percentage needs to be at a certain level. That's it. It has nothing to do with sit ups. Granted sit ups will develop the muscles of the abs just as weight lifting develops the body, but to see you abs is a matter of low body fat percentages, that's all.

As it stands now, you already have a wonderfully toned body. The problem is that it is lying underneath a layer of fat. Fat cells cannot become muscle tissue and vice versa. If you were to drop to a body fat percentage of about 8% right now, you would have awesome abs and a pretty defined physique. The challenge then is to rip through the fat and get to the lean muscle. By lifting weights we kill two birds with one stone.

What makes building muscle even better than the obvious aesthetics of it all, is the fact that the more lean muscle we have on our bodies, the less fat we will inevitably have because muscle is metabolically active. That simply means that muscles, as well as internal organs, are constantly using energy to sustain themselves which means they will be using more fat for energy.

A word of caution: the models that we see on the covers of magazines with the really defined abs have to go through a really rigorous training and eating plan to drop their body fat levels down to percentages where the abs show the way they do. Pro bodybuilders will tell you that they too also have to seriously cut calories before a competition to get their abs to show.

It can be done. People do it every day, every week, every month. What you put in is what you will get out. The routines and advice on this blog are not meant to be short term goals, remember that, and so the advice and instruction you will receive here will ensure that you start the journey of building muscle and losing weight, and that you maintain it for as long as is humanly possible.