Ladies, men do love the look of a toned six-pack ab middle on women and consider it extremely sexy.

We’re not talking mega muscles, but a tight, toned belly are with a rippling of lightly sculpted muscle.

Getting six-pack abs has become one of the popular choices to keep the body fit and healthy among women. This is because it does not only guarantee a fast way of improving muscle but also the body’s endurance and strength as well.

Strength training as the key to six-pack ab

Women who are looking forward to having six-pack abs must undergo strength training so she can endure all the physical requirements of her goal. To start with, it is ideal to do strength training exercises at least 3 times a week for at least 20 minutes or so to prepare the muscles for more rigorous physical movements.

Aside from preparing your body’s muscle for more extreme physical exercises, strength training can also give a woman firm muscles for a great looking physique in the future.

Studies show that strength training is very important for women who are gearing towards having six-pack abs because it can increase the endurance and strength of the developed muscles that can allow women perform tasks daily with lesser exertion and effort.

This can also improve the working capacity of the muscles buts also aid the body’s coordination, balance, and blood circulation as well as the strength of the joint, ligaments, and bones.

Experts say that to be able to develop muscle and achieve six-pack abs through strength training, women should always make it a practice to stretch before she starts and after she has performed some weight exercises to prepare the joints for the pending motion during the weight lifting.

Stretching is very important for beginners because it can reduce soreness after the exercises and can help prevent cramped muscles while increasing the range of your motion.

Women who are doing workouts to get six-pack abs can do common stretching exercises such as warm-ups that include flexibility and stretching exercises to keep the muscles supple, increase the joints’ range of motion, heart rate and body temperature, and blood flow to muscles, enhance flexibility, and improve coordination.

Cool-downs are also important to return the heart rate as well as the blood pressure to resting mode gradually. Since they are composed of slow walking and stretching, it can relax the sore muscles during and after the exercise.

After stretching, the strength-training exercises can help women who are into the trend of getting six-pack abs:

- side shoulder raise which focuses more on arms, thighs, elbows, and palms to give more strength to the shoulder;

- front shoulder raise which highlights the arms using thighs and palms during weight lifting repetitions;

- upright row which is good for the shoulders, neck, and upper back because it strengthens a woman’s upper back to endure more activities;

- biceps curl which is good for strengthening the biceps or the front arm by curling it upward using repetitive motions up to the shoulders; and the

- one-arm dumbbell triceps curl which is the most ideal strength training for women who are looking forward to perfect six-pack abs because the effort exerted here benefits almost all parts of the body.

Don’t forget …all the exercises in the world won’t do much for you if you pack in the junk food every day. Over eating and taking in too many calories will cause you to create a layer of fat which will cover you nicely sculpted abs.

You want to eat the best, most natural food possible so that each calorie that you take in goes to making your body a healthier, sexier and longer lasting body possible.

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Fitness training, like most other things should always be based on expert advice.
Without using proper techniques we can become susceptible to injury and this is counter productive in the least.

The biggest mistake most people make when they start a fitness-training program is let their enthusiasm get the better of them and over do their exercises in an attempt to reach their goals as soon as possible.

This can be a fast track to disaster where muscles that might not have been used much in years are subject to intensive workouts.

Or alternatively, we decide that we need to reduce weight and eliminate fat and want results like yesterday.

It is also common for people to have a goal that might be completely out of reach for any number of reasons.
While we might like to have the body of a professional bodybuilder, there are factors that might make this impossible like the genetics that we have been born with.
There is also the time involved to get to that level of condition and the supplements and other foods that need to be consumed to reach those goals.

It is better to set goals that are achievable in the short term and change the ‘goal posts’ once you have started down the road to fitness and managed to see some results.

It is also vitally important to listen to the advice of the experts and let them help you plan your fitness program.

They might be telling you something that you might not want to hear about your goals and expectation, but initially you will need to rely on their advice and experience until you have sufficient knowledge of your own to work with.

Staying focused is one of the biggest problems that is found where people don’t reach their goals.

While it might be good fun to go to the gym for socializing, you can’t expect to build a powerful body by leaning on the machines and talking to the other people in the gym.

Focusing on one fitness program at a time will produce better results too, rather than changing from one program to another before either gets a chance to make an impact.

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Is Cardio and Standard Intervals Effective For Fat Loss?

Over the last year or so there has been much talk about whether or not doing cardio exercises like walking and running and standard interval training actually effective for weight loss – fat loss.

Here is a transcript of an interview of Alwyn Cosgrove talking about this same subject.
I know that you will enjoy it and learn much from it.

Mike: Thanks for taking the time to do this interview. First so we all have some perspective, how long have you been a trainer?

: I started training people in 1989. Actually 1987 if you count teaching martial arts classes. In 1995 (after college) I went full time. Since day one I’ve been very particular about what I do. I track and tweak everything. When we opened Results Fitness in 2000, we really started to gather a lot of data. We currently have 250 members and we track all their workouts and body comp changes week in and week out.

Mike: So it is like you run your own fat loss studies at your gym?
Alwyn: Exactly. We had read all the studies showing interval training to be superior for fat loss than steady state training. This confirmed what we were seeing with our clients. But I am a big belier in that there is no physiological limit to the amount of weight a person can lose in a week, month, or year so I kept tweaking and tracking the results.

Mike: What has been one of your biggest breakthroughs lately?
Alwyn: One day it hit me — cardiovascular programming is an ass-backwards concept.
I don’t know when I first thought this – but it was confirmed to me when viewing Lance Armstrong’s performance in the New York Marathon.
I’d been taught through my college education and countless training certifications and seminars that cardio vascular exercise was necessary to improve the cardio vascular system and subsequently aerobic performance.
But there seemed an inherent flaw in that argument….
Why didn’t Lance Armstrong – with perhaps one of the highest recorded VO2 max levels in history – win the New York Marathon? Or beat people with lesser aerobic levels than himself?
The greatest endurance cyclist (and possibly endurance athlete) of all time – the seven time Tour De France winner – finished 868th and described the event as the “hardest physical thing” he had ever done.
Runner’s World Magazine actually examined Lance’s physiology (and VO2 max which was tested at 83) and compared them to the numbers of Paul Tergat (the World Record holder and defending NYC Marathon Champion at the time).
They concluded:
“This figure wouldn’t mean much if it weren’t for the pioneering research of famed running coach Jack Daniels, Ph.D., who first published his Oxygen Power tables in 1979– According to Daniels, who’s rarely off by more than a smidgen or two, a max VO2 of 83 is roughly equivalent to a 2:06 marathon”
Based on his other physical qualities the magazine suggested that Lance was capable of running 2:01:11.
The world record at the time was 2:04:55
Lance ran 2:59:36 (and don’t misinterpret me – that’s still a great time). But it’s clear that the physiology didn’t transfer the way event he running community expected.
The flaw in this thinking was looking solely at aerobic capacity — VO2 max – the “engine” as it were. And it’s fair to say that Lance had a “Formula One” engine.
But he didn’t have the structural development for running. Lance was a cyclist – his body had adapted to the demands of cycling. But NOT to the specific demands of running (in fact Lance had only ran 16 miles at once EVER prior to running the marathon). Lance had developed strength, postural endurance and flexibility in the correct “cycling muscles” – but it didn’t transfer to running the way his VO2 max did.

From this example we know that cardio training doesn’t transfer well from one activity to another – and it only ‘kicks’ in because of muscular demand – why don’t we program muscular activity first – in order to create a cardiovascular response. Makes total sense.

So how does this relate to fat loss? We have found that our most successful fat loss programs center around stimulating the muscles to burn more calories not ramping up and down the cardiovascular system. What matters is total calories burn and how much you can increase the person’s metabolism. It is a total shift in thinking.

Mike: Wow. So it is this the death of intervals and cardio? How to you put this into action with clients?
Alwyn: What we have found is so great about this approach is that you burn more calories, lose more weight, while putting a lot less stress on your joints.
Here’s how I like to think about it. Let’s look at traditional interval training which uses running.
Depending on stride length – walking a mile takes about 2000 repetitions and running takes 1000-1500 and will burn on average 100 calories or so.
So if we use an interval training model of running and walking – we’re looking at around 1500 reps to burn 100 calories.
If we take traditional models of caloric burn – this means we’d need to do 35 miles to lose one pound of fat from our interval training efforts discounting the metabolic afterburn for now).
So we have a problem. It’s a very poor “rate of return” on our “rep investment”.
Additionally – running applies a vertical force of 2x bodyweight on the joints of the lower body.
So now we have a dilemma.
Let’s choose a 180lb deconditioned overweight client.
1500 reps x 360lbs = 540,000lbs of force to burn 100 calories. (The 360lbs is 2x 180lbs)
That’s a lot of stress on the joints. Now no one was getting injured, but it seemed like there had to be a better way.
So — we started to think of how we could use different interval training methods other than running to get the same metabolic effect without stressing the joints so much.
We used the airdyne bike, other bikes in order to create a training effect with less load. But whenever you take the bodyweight out of the equation in cardio – you have to work harder to burn the same calories. So this usually needs more reps. So that didn’t seem like a much better idea.
At this point we started using metabolic training with weight training implements/kettlebells and bodyweight in the same interval format.
So a circuit of five exercises, performed three times round (15 total sets) would actually burn more calories than the same time spent doing traditional cardio. That was a plus.
But we could also do sets of 10-15 reps. So we’re looking at 225 total reps (with a force LESS than your bodyweight) as opposed to 1500+ reps at double bodyweight.
We gave it a try. Clients loved it (which was a plus), and actually started to get better results than we were getting with intervals.
So we get more fat loss, less stress on the body, and happier clients. It is a win-win-win. Currently we don’t program traditional interval training our regular fat loss clients.
So, yeah…it is the death of traditional intervals.
You can get a sample workout using this kind of training program at:
WarpSpeedFatloss.com

Mike: This is great stuff. Thanks for taking the time. I definitely recommend that everyone go to:
WarpSpeedFatLoss.com and pick up the workout to try.

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Wasn’t that interview an eye opener? It was for me.

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