Not only are most traditional ab workouts a waste of time, but they also slow your
fat loss efforts. Each workout you spend crunching takes time away from more effective
fat loss methods - such as interval training.
That's right, the common man's (and woman's) ab workout taken from Shape magazine
or Muscle'n'Fitness often hurts their fat loss program more than it helps it.
Remember - I'm in the business of getting you the most fat loss in the least amount
of exercise time...so I have little room in my program for traditional ab crunches
(with the exception of using basic ab exercises for beginners who need to learn
to use their ab muscles after a lifetime of inactivity).
Instead, I focus on exercises that build a 6-pack AND burn a lot of calories at
the same time. That's why I'm a big fan of making EVERY exercise an ab exercise
(by bracing the abs in every movement), as well as using total body ab exercises
(such as Mountain Climbers, the Spiderman Lunge/Climb, and the Stability Ball Jackknife).
These exercises use far more muscle mass than a traditional crunch. In fact, some
of the total body ab exercises are "interval-like" in nature, helping
to put more metabolic turbulence on the body, and as you know, that's what burns
calories during AND after the workout.
Now of course you know that you can't spot reduce the fat on your body - so doing
an endless number of crunches not only does little for you in terms of losing fat,
it also wastes your time in your quest for a 6-pack.
Here are a couple of strategies to maximize your workout time when your goal is
to get lean, and get down to a low-enough body fat percentage to see your abs in
as little workout time as possible:
(If you've got 2 hours a day to workout, by all means, do whatever your heart desires...but
I don't think many of us that live in the real world have that kind of time.)
A) First, simply cut back on your ab training - If your goal is to simply lose fat,
gain a little muscle, and just look as good possible, then you can't spend 30 minutes
on abs everyday. You can build your 6-pack by doing less than 30 minutes of ab exercise
per week.