Successful completion of any plan including abs workout at home is as much about managing distractions and time as it is about the exercise.
Effective workouts include both in the form of an action plan. Within an action plan, your beginning point and your endpoint become clear.
Once you know where you are and where you want to be, you can plan the steps that tell you how long it takes to reach your goal.
Many people neglect to clarify their goal. With all the distractions in life, without a clear goal to focus your energies, it is easy to misspend the little time you have in your busy schedule.
Here are six steps you can use at home to help you lose weight and get your six pack abs.
Step One – It Is Not About Abs
Your abdominal muscles are very small, and they become visible as soon as the layers of fat covering them melt away.
Exercises that directly engage your abdominal muscles to burn very few calories regardless of how many of them you do.
Effective at home workout plans to burn calories engage larger muscle groups like your butt, your thighs, your back and your chest.
Step Two – Sex Matters
Don’t get too excited. By sex I mean gender. There are physiological and anatomical differences between men and women.
For example, women, for the most part, have wider hips than men. This wider hip contributes to knee imbalances especially during popular calorie burning exercises like burpees.
Another example is the three holes in the pelvic floor of women as opposed to two holes in the pelvic floor of men. Abdominal breathing exercises are more of necessity for women especially after childbirth and surgical procedure related to childbirth.
There are other differences you need to consider to match the exercise to your gender.
Step Three – Push Away More Than Push Up
Push up variations are very effective in burning a lot of calories and build upper body strength. However, within a few minutes, you can replenish all those calories by having a pint of ice-cream.
Push away exercises are when you push the processed, high calorie, low nutrient dense food away and replace them with a low-calorie high nutrient dense foods.
You already have six-pack abs. Everyone does. For some, the six-pack is hidden under layers of fat and for others is not.
The best ab exercises are done during meal preparation in your kitchen and not at the gym.
Step Four – Heat Up Before You Serve It
When it comes to food, most understand the value of warming the food up before eating it. However, when the same people, are often in a hurry to get to what they consider to be their workout and skip the warm-up.
The right amount of heat is necessary for delicious foods and effective workouts. I have entire segments of workouts dedicated to warm up.
For now, consider the reset element of warm-up that helps you get away from distractions and focus. In a busy day, it is hard just to flip a switch and move from one project to an intense workout. The mind loves to stay busy and distracted.
Warm up gives you the time to gently pull the mind away from one project and focus it on your workout.
Step Five – Head To Toe
Increased demand on your lungs and heart forms one of the most basic elements of fat loss and cardiopulmonary fitness.
When you are out breath because of exercise and not illness, you know every cell in your body is running at maximum capacity, and they demand more oxygenated blood. That is why your heart is pounding faster, and your lungs heave.
Full body workouts that engage all or most of your major muscle groups deliver a head to toe demand on your body that isolated upper or lower body exercises do not.
Step Six – Priority Matters Even In Best Ab Workouts
Time management touches every aspect of struggling and success. The ability to prioritize is one of the fundamentals of time management.
Forget the illusion that is called multi-tasking.
To make the point, you cannot squat down and do a pull up at the same time. Squat uses the large muscle groups of your legs and pull-ups engage the large muscle groups of your upper body.
They are both important, but you cannot do them together. And if you workout close to your maximum capacity, your body doesn’t even have enough juice to do them both on the same day.
This example makes sense to those who have tried it.
What about building strength vs. losing fat. To build strength, you need to use heavy loads and longer rest between sets which could burn a lot of sugar as fuel. Becoming stronger is a function of Type II muscle fibers.
To burn fat as the fuel you need to work out longer with lighter loads and shorter rest. Endurance training is a function of Type I muscle fibers.
When you pay attention to research, you’ll find out that spending mind-numbing hours on treadmill based on the idea of burning fat is not effective without comparable strength building exercises.
The priority for most is first building strength and muscle mass while burning a lot of sugar and then burning fat through endurance training.
Step Seven – Cool It Baby
Any workout that increases your heart rate, your respiration rate, and burns a log of calories, moves the blood away from your abdominal cavity and stomach area to your arms and legs.
You are essentially in a superheated condition. Give your body the chance to cool down slowly and return to normal.
Cooldown is also an excellent time to do stretching exercises with your muscles all warm and blood gorged.
Do your cool down. Every organ of your body thanks you for it.