Stomach Fat Myths
The first Myth - abdominal muscle is different from other muscles
Sorry, not true. Abdominals are just like all the other muscles except for one thing – they don’t sit against a bony surface, like the biceps or quadriceps. Instead, they span the stomach and intestines like a roof. This means you have to work them like any other muscles.
The second Myth – certain exercises can melt away abdominal fat
Spot reducing has been disproved a thousand times, but some people still believe it works – mainly because unscrupulous exercise programmes try and convince us that by purchasing one bit of kit and using it ten minutes a day we too can look like a beach volley ball star. Think about it for a second. If you drive, you spend hours every day exercising your hands, if you use a keyboard the same is true, but you don’t have massive muscular hands, do you? No. So you can’t work your abdominals in isolation. Doing crunches or sit ups may help you develop abs of steel, but they’ll still be covered by body fat if you don’t watch your diet and do cardiovascular activity to reduce the fat layer – in fact, if you look at many martial artists, that’s exactly what you’ll see – a layer of fat over the abs, because they need that level of fat to endure the exercises they undertake every day.
The third Myth – the best exercise is to do lots of sit-ups
Complete sit-ups may be incredibly tough, but they primarily strengthen muscles that are already strong, and these are not even abdominal muscles. If you rise all the way up, you’re actually working your hip flexors, which have nothing to do with your belly and waist. That six-pack muscle is the rectus abdominis, but even if you could find an exercise that focused on it, that wouldn’t do the job. You need strengthen the external obliques, internal obliques and the transverse abdominals. So variety is the key.
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