Having focused and direct exercises tailored to a particular area of your body is no doubt a great way to tone up, especially your abdominal area. However this focused approach can become very counterproductive and end up wasting not only your time but your energy as well. With an absurd amount of crunches and situps this can start to become the case. Being well informed about the disadvantages a certain exercise can have is good to do, so that mistakes are limited and your time and energy are maximized. Below we will review a few of the problems of continually using crunches and sit ups to get wash board abs.
How They Affect Your Stomach Muscles: Most of us would assume that doing crunches is the best possible way to get focused results for our mid section, so we begin to engage in these exercises on a daily basis. What you might not realize is that when you do crunches and situps on a regular basis you can actually create problems for your abs. When you engage in working out your abs each day as part of your regular workout routines you will begin to affect how your ab muscles work. The general idea is that by doing daily crunches you are strengthening your mid section but in but in reality you are causing a damaging affect to how those muscles work.
Crunches And Situps are Inefficient Time Wasters: Because time is your most valuable asset you should strive to maximize the effectiveness of the exercises you choose to spend your time doing. The bottom line is that exercising your abs via crunches and situps every day is an inefficient way of using your exercise time. Generally speaking when a person wants to spend a lot of time on their ab muscles it is because they desire a particular look for that area of their body, we usually refer to this as the six pack abs or ripped abs look. The problem of course is that these types of exercises that are used to gain nice abs quickly lose their effectiveness as your body begins to plateau. This generally happens very quickly and even though engaging and crunches and situps every day and for longer periods of time per day your body still gets used to it.
Other Body Parts Become Less important: By working out your ab muscles each day you begin to give importance to that area of your body and perhaps begin to neglect other areas. The resulting effect can be someone who looks unhealthy everywhere else. When weight is gained due to exercising it is usually gained all over and not in just one local area. Therefore if losing weight all over your body is a primary importance you should give equal thought and time to the other important areas of your body.
This is a logical thought process because if you apply this rule to other areas say your biceps, you would never workout strictly on your biceps seven days a week. The question then should be why would you ever workout on your abs seven days a week? The bottom line is that you simply wouldn’t and therefore you shouldn’t, because it is not the healthy course. So avoid trying to force a particular area of your body to get results because when you do that you can end up doing more damage than good and injuring yourself.
Your Metabolism Is Not Increased By Doing Crunches: To really drop serious body fat increasing your metabolism is a fundamental building block that needs to be done. Having a good metabolism that burns away fat is very important for ab workouts that bring results. Crunches however really don’t help out when it comes to increasing your metabolism. It cannot help to increase metabolism. What does help your metabolism is for you to create strong muscle mass equally allover your body. So to increase your metabolism you must focus on your back, arms, and legs muscles.
Strictly Doing Mundane Abs Workouts Can Be Counter Productive: Anything in life that becomes boring or mundane will eventually have its interests lost and will fizzle out. An objective of our workout routines when trying to focus on a particular area of your body should not only be to make it look better, but should also include making sure that the particular exercise you do does not become boring. Exercising by means of crunches and situps each and every day will surely become boring and counterproductive.
Try to incorporate other workout routines, fitness DVDs, sports, to cut down on boredom of a particular routine. Enlist as many friends as you can to help you come up with new and inventive ways to help you get a better looking midsection. By doing these things and following these suggestions you will in fact reach your goals and feel great when you do.
Before you choose your abs workout program check out my favorite in home workout routines that have helped all kinds of people get in shape and get amazing looking abs. Hip Hop Abs is a fantastic program that delivers great midsection results.