When you start a workout to get flat stomach, unless you are an expert, you get bombarded with advice from all quarters regarding the intensity with which you should train, the frequency of your workouts, what you should eat, the exercises that you should be doing – the list just goes on and on.
Your dilemma is evident – do you treat the abs workout just the same as the workout for the rest of the muscle groups in your body, giving it days of rest in between consecutive sessions or do you just go at it all guns blazing throughout the week. Here is some food for thought to help you decide how often you need to work your abs muscles:
* Your ab muscles are being used the whole day, and are in a state of contraction for long durations – which makes them less prone to fatigue. While it may be tempting to use this fact to submit these muscles to grueling sessions to get a flat stomach, you need to remember that the ab muscles are similar to other muscle groups in your body. Rest is essential to build lean muscle mass no matter where it is located on your body.
* If you work on your abs with weights, they will certainly need rest to help them recover and grow. So working on them without rest days is just not an option.
* However, if you are doing exercises such as crunches that use your body weight alone, you can train daily and still have the muscles recover.
* If you overwork your abs muscles and they become fatigued, then they will not be able to provide the prolonged support that you require for you day to day activities.
* What really gets your abs to show up? If you do many exercises to get flat stomach but don’t pay much attention to the efficiency of these routines or their contribution to overall weight loss, you may not be realizing the full potential reduction of fat that you could achieve. The abs muscles are small and burn lesser energy when exercised in comparison with the calories burnt while exercising the larger muscle groups.
In the final analysis, you really don’t need to work your abs daily; giving them a break between workouts is a good idea. The best way to reduce belly fat and get flat stomach is by exercising the larger muscle groups in your body a lot more than your abs. So when you are drawing up your workout, remember these facts.