Booze, Sit-ups & Six Pack Abs, Part I

Categories: Abdominal Exercises • Weight Loss

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Following is an excerpt of the interview between Scott Colby and Todd Scott, author of the How to Get Six Pack Abs program. Editor’s Note: The content contained in this interview is meant only to give you an idea of the author’s level of expertise and point of view. You should always draw your own conclusions when listening to the advice of others.

If you’re interested in discovering some areas where you may be going wrong in your abs training and your attempts at losing stomach fat, this is an interview that you’ll want to read.

The first half of the interview is below. In this part, we’ll just deal with training aspects.

In the second part of the interview, Todd covers the nutrition aspects – plus he goes into step-by-step detail about how you can booze it up and still burn off your belly!

Here’s the first part of the interview:

SC: Why don’t sit ups, crunches, and the ab machine gizmos help you get a 6-pack?

TS: Think about this for a minute. Our muscles are designed to adapt to the amount of stress consistently placed on them, so if sit ups, crunches, and ab machines are supposed make your belly shrink, then that would mean adding additional stress to other muscle groups would cause them to get smaller, too. Yet, when you see someone who is at an advanced fitness level, their muscles are typically larger than the average person.

For example, have you seen a cyclists’ legs? By cycling alone, they place more stress on their leg muscles than the average person. The result? Moderate to large leg muscles.

Basically, muscles adapt according to the amount of consistent stress you put on them. If you do leg exercises, your leg muscles will adapt to the added stress by becoming stronger and denser. That means they get bigger, and that’s why people who want bigger (not smaller) legs do squats and other leg exercises rather than avoiding them.

We sometimes forget that our abdominals are made up of the same material and are muscles themselves. So by training them (regardless if you’re doing sit-ups, crunches or an ab machine), the same thing will happen, they’ll grow stronger and denser. And in the end they’ll be bigger. It has very little to do with burning fat.

It’s true that by increasing the size of your ab muscles you’ll increase the rate of your metabolism to an extent, but not enough to make a noticeable difference.

You can see undeniable truth that ab exercises, sit ups, and crunches will not help you get a six pack by reading the story of Mark Pheltz at How to Get Six Pack Abs. He set the Guinness Book of World Records for the number of sit-ups at one time. How many did he do? 45,005 Sit-ups in 58.5 hours… Go see for yourself if he had six pack abs, you’ll be shocked: How to Get Six Pack Abs

SC: What types of exercises do work to shed belly fat?

TS: There really isn’t a “type” of exercise that burns fat better than others. Some will argue that full body movements burn fat faster, but there’s more than one method that works.

The fact remains that the more muscle you have on your body, the more calories you’ll be able to burn during a given day. So, no matter whether you’re a man or a woman, the ultimate goal is to choose exercises that stimulate the most amount of muscle at a time.

If you want to go with full body movements, that’s perfectly fine. Generally, I will train men and women differently even though both can lose fat by following the same program.

Guys typically like having large, hard muscles overall, so in order to burn the maximum amount of fat while still focusing on smaller muscles, I’ll use both single and multi-joint movements within supersets or triple sets as well as adding explosive movements.

Here’s an example triple set I’d use:

Bench Press
Barbell Curl
Explosive Med Ball Push Up

Here you have all three – Multi-joint movement (bench press), followed by a single-joint movement (barbell curl), and ending with an explosive movement (explosive med ball pushup). The single-joint movement is included as the second exercise in the set to act as an “active” rest for the more metabolically demanding explosive medicine ball pushup, which utilizes the same muscles as the first exercise in the sequence. However, although, the single-joint movement is an “active” rest, it should still be performed at maximal intensity.

Since the gals typically aren’t concerned with muscle size or hardness and just want the lean toned look, I generally use the same format but with less emphasis on the single joint movements. Here, the single joint movement would be a “true” active rest.

Here’s an example triple set I’d use:

Step-Ups
Bench Dips
Squat Jumps

The focus of this set is on the legs. The bench dips are thrown in to divert stress away from the legs in preparation for the more metabolically demanding Squat Jumps. Your heart will be pounding by the middle of the second set, so you’ll gladly welcome the Bench Dips as an active rest while being able to focus attention to the back of the arms.

In all if you place more focus on the larger muscle groups, you will burn more fat. But if you want to give your body a metabolic spike, I suggest mixing it up.

That wraps up our training portion of the interview. For more info about whether the How to Get Six Pack Abs Program is right for you, be sure to check out the site:

How to Get Six Pack Abs

I’ll be back in a few days with the portion of the interview where we discuss the common nutrition mistakes most people make, along with Todd’s recommended tips and strategies – PLUS the nutrition side of the how you can drink booze and still lose belly fat!