What can you actually do to get visible washboard abs? That’s the question that a lot of us are asking, but above all, at what cost? Men’sHealth.com asked internet users what they had to do to overcome the excess belly fat. Around a hundred of them responded, and almost all of them centre around the same ideas.
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Abs are made in the kitchen
The first element which came out, is diet. This isn’t a shock to anyone, but you have to have a balanced, appropriate diet to be able to melt the fat away and give rise to six (or eight) well defined bumps on our stomachs. But what we can’t have is alcohol. We don’t describe someone as having a beer belly for nothing.
“The point where I found myself closest to having a six pack is when I stopped drinking,” describes a reader. “After just one month I could see the difference in the mirror, even after drinking just two beers the day before”. Yes, alcohol makes you fat, and yes, alcohol is very bad for your muscle gains.
Work your abs like your other muscles
If diet’s the first step to visible abs, you need to train them as well. As with all muscles, you have to do it in the right way, with the correct movements and techniques. Out with long sessions and hello intense training.
“It’s the intensity of your training which is important, not the duration. I’ve had 10-minute training sessions which have seemed like absolute hell, and hour-long sessions which have seemed like a chore” another Internet user said. Some even go as far as saying that a 10-15 minute session at the end of every workout is plenty. To give you an example, Arnold Schwarzenegger did 5 sets of abs per workout when he was training for the Mr Olympia title.
Of course, we’re far from the Governator’s level, but other exercises are excellent for our core despite not uniquely targeting this area. For example, Turkish get ups work the whole body, as well as certain other exercises which require balance.
