How To Get Defined Abs

The rates of overweight or obese people continue to skyrocket in the U.S. Many people would like to know how to get defined abs, but don't take the necessary steps to do it.

If you diet without exercising or exercise without dieting you may not get anywhere. If you focus on just dieting you could end up with a "skinny fat" look. If you just focus on exercising you may build abs that are still covered by a layer of body fat. You need to use a combination of diet, cardiovascular exercise, weight training, and abdominal workouts to get optimal results. This goes for both men and women. Whether you’re a serious fitness or bodybuilding competitor or you just want to look good on the beach, your main priorities should be getting defined abs and tightening your midsection.

Having lifted weights regularly for many years, I've always had a decent amount of muscle mass. Unfortunately, for the majority of my adult life, I kept a bit of a belly. Not a lot of a belly for the most part, or so I thought. However, when I finally cleaned up my diet for real I found that over 30 extra pounds were what I usually had hanging around. Being heavier than usual when I started this journey, it ended up being a total loss of over 50 pounds.

The thing that keeps many individuals from succeeding in their search for how to get defined abs is the extra body fat they have. A lot of people are always on the go and don't have time to prepare healthy meals, so they end up eating fast food more often than they should. Supermarkets are filled with processed foods that aren't very good for you. These processed and fast foods can add up quickly and cause you to gain body fat. However, it's a must to eat nutritious food that’s low in calories if you want to get six pack abs. The key to losing fat is to consume less calories than your body burns. One pound of fat contains 3500 calories, so if you cut your daily caloric intake by 500 it adds up to a pound of fat loss in a week. This is a good and safe starting point for most people. If you cut your calories to an extremely low number you'll end up losing muscle as well as fat and will be more likely to binge out.

You can also manipulate your diet to increase your metabolism. To do this you actually have to eat more frequently than normal. Consuming 5 or 6 small meals per day instead of 3 large ones is better for fat loss because the processes of eating and digesting will speed up your metabolism. You also won't get energy lags in between meals since you are eating more often. Your low calorie meals should made up of protein sources such as lean red meat, chicken breast, or fish and carbohydrate sources like green vegetables and fruit. You'll also want to keep healthy fats in your diet. Prepare your meals in the morning or the night before and take them with you in a cooler when you leave for the day. Meal replacement bars and shakes will also allow you to get quick and nutritious meals when you are on the go.

Once you start losing fat from dieting your abs will start to show. This should inspire you to keep going in your quest to get ripped abs.

Exercise is also essential if you want to learn how to get defined abs. Burning extra calories and boosting your metabolism through intense cardiovascular and weight training exercise will certainly speed up fat loss. You can make your workouts much more efficient if you train with high intensity.

Many people believe that you must spend 45 minutes or more doing cardio to burn calories, but if you train with higher intensity and do shorter workouts your body will continue burning more calories after your workout. If you don't have a lot of time to do cardio, throw in some high intensity work every few minutes. This will allow you get your cardiovascular workout finished within half an hour and still lose fat.

The muscle mass that you build from weight training will also help you lose fat to get defined abs by increasing your resting metabolic rate. The muscles that you build will require energy - which will result in more calories burned even when you are at rest. Most guys want to build muscle anyway, so they will have no problem with this. However, most women shy away from weight training because they fear that they will get too big. You must know that this is very unlikely to happen since women don't have the natural amounts of testosterone necessary for big muscle gains. You don't have to build very much muscle to get the benefits of a faster metabolism. While men should focus on working all of their muscles when they weight train, most women will be happy to focus mostly on their lower bodies with a little upper body training thrown in.

If you perform abdominal workouts regularly you'll be on your way to getting ripped abs. When you get rid of that extra body fat you'll want your ab muscles to be on display. To develop the abdominal and obliques muscles of your midsection you need to do exercises such as crunches, twisting incline sit-ups, leg raises and side bends. It's best to do ab exercises with no or very little extra weight for high rep sets since you don’t want your waist to appear too thick. Your goal should be to develop a small, tight, and defined midsection. The abdominal muscles also recover faster than other muscles so you can train them more often