3 Ab Exercise Tips You Need For A Flat Stomach

Will the proper ab exercise give you the flat stomach that you're looking for?

Ab training has been done to death but it's time to take another look. Why? Because people are still training their abs wrong so all that ab training information must not be doing the job.

1 - No Spot Reducing - Endless crunches will not melt away the fat from your midsection. It just doesn't work that way. And despite the "burn" of high rep ab exercises, you barely burn any calories while doing those endless crunches.

Your fat burning time is best spent elsewhere on more effective training. You also don't work the ab muscle intensely enough to develop it.

So endless high rep crunches fail on both counts - poor muscle building and poor fat burning. Two thumbs down as the cliche goes. Proper ab exercise just doesn't involve endless crunches or sit ups. At least not if you want to achieve the results that you are looking for.

2 - The Abs are a Muscle and should be trained as such. You don't need high reps and lots of sets to work your abs. This just leads to overtraining.

Now, abs are a more endurance oriented muscle so slightly higher reps may be more effective. However, you should keep the reps at 20 or lower and work on increasing the resistance.

Yes, you should be increasing the weights on your ab exercise, just like your other exercises. The stronger your abs, the better they will look when the fat is stripped away.

Ever see a really thin guy with a flat stomach but no abs? The abs haven't been trained (at least not properly) and aren't developed enough to stand out even when the fat is stripped away. By the way, proper ab exercise will also make sure your stomach stays flat. Abs that aren't properly trained can cause the stomach to stick out like a little pot belly, even if you have very low body fat.

3 - Don't train the abs - What the heck do I mean by this? Well, your abs get a lot of indirect work from other exercises so you really won't need more than a couple of hard sets of weighted crunches to work your abs.

Your abs are a factor in exercises such as squats, deadlifts, seated or standing presses, dumbbell pullovers, pulldowns, etc. Don't believe me?

Next time you work out, do a few hard sets of standing stiff armed pulldowns on the lat machine and tell me your abs aren't sore the next day. I did them yesterday and my abs are more sore than my back today.

If you want to develop a flat stomach with your abs visible, you need to treat your abs like a muscle and train that way. And you need to strip away the fat with a proper training and nutrition program designed around total fat loss, not trying to spot reduce through endless crunches.

For lots of weight training tips, fat loss, nutrition and exercise program information to help you build your best body as quickly as possible, check out my Fit Physique Fit N Healthy newsletter. It's free and you'll receive a number of bonuses just for signing up.

Here are some top abdominal exercises you can use to flatten your stomach.