4 Strategies Professionals Use for killer 6 Pack Abs

Sometimes all it takes to get caught up in the hype of the latest ab machine or miracle pill is a simple photograph of a stunning set of 6-pack abs. Just about everyone wants six pack abs, or at least a trim waistline, if not a muscular one, so all the glory these days has gone to exercising the abdominal muscles. But this has caused some serious problems, and falling for the latest gimmick is not the least of them.
When you become so focused on abs and abdominal exercises, you tend to completely forget that there's much more to seeing your abs than doing crunches and other exercises for the rectus abdominis.
By focusing only on the 6-pack muscles, not only do you fail to learn about the complexity and importance of the entire core region and the deeper muscles that aren't so "glamorous," you also tend to completely forget the other things that absolutely must come before 6-pack abs ever arrive.
If you fail to do these other 4 things first, it doesn't matter how much abdominal exercise you do, you will never see a six pack.
To See A set of Six Pack Abs, First, Your Body Fat Must Be Low enough The biggest reason most people can't see their abs is because most of the population is overweight or even obese today. For your abdominals to show through, you need a low enough body fat percentage. For men to see a clearly defined set of six pack abs, it usually requires getting down to about 10% body fat or less, and for the women, it's usually about 16% body fat or less. It's not possible to
tell you exactly what body fat you will have to reach to see your abs because it also depends on your individual genetics. For example, one man can see a six pack at 11% body fat, while other
men say they don't see their abs until they're 7% or 8% body fat. Reduction of body fat is the first and most important thing that must come before a 6-pack. And that leads you to the question, "what is the best way to reduce body fat?" The first priority in reducing body fat is nutrition, because the easiest way to create a caloric deficit is with a reduction in food
intake, but few people think about the quality of the food they're eating, only the quantity. Proper hydration is also critical, but often forgotten. Exercise is the final key, but ab and core exercises alone just won't do it. It takes a certain combination of exercise for optimal results.

The Other 3 Things That Come Before A 6-Pack

1. Eat Organic I preach organic so often that to my regular readers, I probably sound like a broken record. However, it's not without reason: if you want your liver to process body fat efficiently, then you'd better have this important organ working efficiently and kept
in good health. Refined foods and alcohol harm the liver and give it no chance to process body fat the way it was designed to do because it's too busy dealing with all the toxins you've consumed.
So eat as organic as your budget will allow. If you can't afford organic, be sure to wash all of your food items (produce) with a natural food cleaner. Eating organic, fibrous foods will also
increase improve the functioning of your digestive system and create for regular movements. You should have a bowel movement 2-3 times per day. If not, you are putting a lot of unnecessary stress on your digestive system. If this happens, then losing fat and
keeping it off becomes much more difficult. Try free health supplements such as Vitamins here before buying them. This way you will save a lot of money and can test what works for you.

2. Drink and Be Hydrated! I urge every one of my clients and readers to drink more water. Many people understand the importance of avoiding dehydration, but they don't realize how
important water is in helping remove fat from the body. Most of us are dehydrated and do not even know it. Here's a simple hydration test – pinch the skin on the back of your hand. Pull is up as high as it can go, then let it go. Does it go back to normal immediately? If not, then you're dehydrated. The rule of thumb is to drink a minimum of a half an ounce of water for every pound of body weight. So if you weigh 200 lbs, you drink at least 100 ounces (Also, if possible, avoid tap water or plastic bottled water as plastic contributes to estrogen and that encourages stubborn fat)

3. Exercise right! If you give body fat a reason to "hang around" (pun intended), then it will. Give body fat a reason to leave and it will do that just as easily. Some kind of activity every single day is just what the doctor ordered for fat loss. Rather than focusing on one type of exercise like bodybuilding or aerobics or yoga or pilates, or just strength or flexibility, I recommend a combination of cardio training, strength training and specific core conditioning exercises. While I recommend exercise such as walking very highly, I also recommend at least some vigorous and intense exercise such as interval training as well. It's this combination of strength and cardio training, plus an active lifestyle in general, that will help you reduce your body fat enough for your abs will show. Try a Free Membership to Jenny Craig for a limited time. You will
lose of weight and get free healthy food as well! Before you jump the gun and go ballistic with "abdominal exercises," remember, that there is more to seeing your abs than just crunches. Seeing "6 pack abs" is first a function of low body fat. Achieving low body fat is in turn a function of what you eat, what you drink and how you move. That makes 4 things that come before a 6-pack. You can "ab roller" and "crunch" until the cows come home, but if you haven't done these four things first, then you're approaching it backwards and will be disappointed.

Training With Muscle Soreness: Should You Do It?

Training With Muscle Soreness: Should You Do It?
By Nick Nilsson

Muscle soreness is something that every trainer has experienced. The typical advice is to wait until you're not sore to train that muscle again. But what if you can actually get BETTER results by training when sore!

It's safe to say that muscle soreness is something EVERY trainer has experienced at some point in their career. Severity of muscle soreness (known as Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness or DOMS for short) can range from mild discomfort when you move to the point of being almost crippling.

One of the most frequent questions I am asked is "should you train when your muscles are still sore?" The answer is not quite as simple as some people make it out to be, though. Many trainers will tell you "if the muscle is still sore, don't train it." And, in truth, for many people that's the safest answer.

But, in fact, by NOT training when you're sore, you could actually be missing out on results AND slowing down your recovery!

So what is muscle soreness? Muscle soreness is basically damage to the muscle fibers as a result of training. Without going into great detail on how it happens and how the recovery process occurs (which is beyond the scope of this article), muscle soreness is your body telling you that it's in need of repair.

Now how can it possibly be GOOD for you to train a muscle again while it's still sore? Here's where we get into a contentious area. After reading this, you may choose to agree with me or disagree with me (if you've read my articles before, you know I'm anything BUT conventional) but all I ask is that you consider my arguments...

Now, if you've never trained a muscle hard two days in a row or trained it while it was still quite sore, you're going to be in for a shock at how unique a stimulus it can actually be. Sure there are arguments against doing that, e.g. the muscle hasn't fully recovered and you'll be tearing it down even more.

But consider this...from an adapatation standpoint, of the following two scenarios, what would give your body the greater stimulus for growth?

If you train the muscle hard once, you'll get a good growth stimulus. Your body immediately starts sending nutrients to the damaged area and starts rebuilding. When the muscle is fully recovered and is no longer sore, you train the muscle again and restart the process. This is the standard way of training and it usually means directly training a muscle twice a week with at least 2 or 3 days in between sessions for that specific muscle.

In the next scenario, you train the muscle hard then the next day, train it hard again. Recovery is nowhere near complete and the muscle is sore when you train it on the second day.

Here's the key...if you think about it, would the body see this second scenario as a greater threat to its survival? Would the body then ramp up its recovery processes to try and prepare for the next challenge, which it (from its recent experience of being hit with the same hard stimulus two days in a row) thinks is coming again very soon?

In my experience, this absolutely happens. The body's response to training is a very simple "stimulus-response" system, but your body is also fully capable of sending more resources where more resources are perceived as being needed.

When you eat, your body sends more blood to the digestive system. Your brain doesn't tell it to do that, it just happens. When you get hot, your body produces perspiration. The same thing happens with training. For example, when you train your biceps, your body sends blood and nutrients to the biceps for recovery. It doesn't send it to the calves if the calves haven't been worked.

If you train your biceps hard two days in a row, your body sees this as a big threat to the biceps and will ramp up recovery processes to specifically protect the biceps. If the biceps are still sore... VERY big threat! THEN you allow the biceps to recover. The two days of training has built much greater recovery momentum, getting more results out of your training.

Here's yet another advantage to training a muscle when it's still sore...even if you don't train it hard, you will still be sending blood (and therefore nutrients) to that muscle, helping it to recover faster than if you didn't train it at all. So even if you're not up for a hard workout for a sore muscle, even giving it some light to moderate work will still help with recovery.

So I've talked about training a muscle two days in a row... what about when you're scheduled to train it a couple of days later and it's still sore at that point? The same concepts apply your body will STILL perceive that as a greater threat and increase recovery.

The only times I would NOT recommend training when sore is if the soreness causes you to use poor form in your exercises or if the soreness is so bad that it makes the exercises too painful to do.

For instance, if you just did deadlifts for the first time in your life and the next day, you have a VERY hard time sitting down without falling down into the seat, you may want to wait a bit before doing deadlifts again. Your form will change because of the pain and it could lead to injury.

But if your muscles are a bit stiff or sore, go ahead and train them. Your body will ramp up your recovery processes in response.

How do I know training the body with this frequency can be effective? I'll give the best example I know (WARNING if you're a proponent of high-intensity, very infrequent training, this will make you shiver in your boots!). This is NOT a program I would recommend lightly to anyone because at this time, being on vacation from work, I was basically only eating, sleeping and training...no stress, no extraneous activity.

This was one of the most extraordinary programs I ever put myself on, not only in terms of workload but results as well. It involved doing total body workouts twice a day, six days a week. This meant 12 total-body workouts per week, increasing the workload every week.

I used partial training, negative training, low reps and high reps. For the entire first week, I was EXTREMELY sore but I stuck with it and trained everything twice a day, no matter how sore I was.

After 3 weeks of this training, I backed off, still doing 12 training sessions per week but splitting the body in half I was still working my whole body every single day and doing partials and negatives.

During the back-off phase, my recovery processes were practically unstoppable! NOTHING I did could make me sore (and believe me, I tried!) and my strength and muscle mass shot way up.

Conventional wisdom would believe I would be completely totaled at the end of a program like this, overtrained, small and weak. My results? In 6 weeks, I went from 208 lbs. in bodyweight to 228 lbs. I went from a 295 bench press for 1 rep to 350 lbs for 1 rep. I did a partial top range lockout squat with 1100 lbs for 150 reps (not a typo!)

This is a VERY extreme example of training through muscle soreness and using maximum workout frequency. But the take-home lesson from it is this: you CAN get great results by training even when you're sore! Your body will react to the stress and ramp up recovery in response.

One quick tip: if you want to decrease post-workout soreness, try taking 500 mg of Vitamin C about an hour before your workout. This helps protect against muscle soreness.