The Best Way to Flatten Your Stomach!

It always seems like the hardest part on your body to improve is the stomach, and I know mine can use some help, which is why I spoke to my friend Nick Nilsson a while back for some insider tips.

I've learned that a lot of what I've been taught about ab training has been misleading, and that can get pretty frustrating when nothing you try seems to work. What Nick told me helped ease a bit of my frustration about the best way to tighten up and flatten your midsection, and luckily for you I recorded our conversation, and typed out his response below...

I would have to say there's a huge misconception with that... A lot of people think that the best way to flatten your stomach is by doing a lot of crunches, and what I've found from my experience and my research is that crunches don't really get the job done. What can actually happen with crunches, if you think about it, every time you're crunching up you're kind of squishing that fat up into a ball in your stomach. And you do this hundreds and hundreds of times, and you're just basically pushing that fat out. Crunches don't do the job.

What you need is something that works muscles that don't hit the front like that. The example I like to use for this is if you've ever seen a tensor bandage, it's like an elastic bandage that people use to wrap up injuries... If someone gave you one of these and said that you need to somehow get this on your body to make your stomach flat, and your waist smaller, what would you do?

You wouldn't wrap that over your shoulder, or down through your legs, around your body lengthwise like that... Yet, if you think about it, the way crunches work, they work the 6-pack abs, and those fibers run lengthwise, up and down your body. So, every time you're doing crunches, you're not really working the muscles that have the potential to flatten your stomach.

What you want to do is, to get back to the example, you'd take that tensor bandage and wrap it directly around your waist, like a girdle. If you tighten that up as tight as you could, that would flatten your stomach, that would tighten your waist. So, you want to basically work the muscles that do the same thing.

You want to work the muscles that basically form that natural weight belt, around your internal core area. And this is like the obliques and the transverse abdominis muscles. These muscles are critically important to keeping your stomach flat, because what they do is provide that support and tension you need, all the time.

So, instead of doing crunches, you focus on exercises that use a lot of rotation, and rotation prevention. For example, preventing rotation is kind of like if you were holing your arms out in front of you, and someone was trying to push your arms to the side, and you resist that, that works those deeper muscles. So, not only can you work them by actually physically moving your arms against resistance, you can actually work those same muscles by resisting... resistance. If that makes sense.

Be honest... when it comes to exercises, and not diet alone, how many times has someone told you to do crunches to slim your waist up? If you use Nick's advice you're going to target the muscles that will naturally snug everything up, acting like a natural girdle, and your time in the gym, or at home, will be better spent.

If you're hungry for more ab training information, then click through to read How to Make Your Ab Training WAY More Functional!