How To Tone Up The Tummy

The dreaded abdominals: is there anyone who wouldn’t like a more toned midsection? And know how to tone up the tummy. For men and women alike, the abdominal muscles or ‘abs’ are one of the keys to a great looking figure. Of course, the weight loss and exercise industries have cottoned on to this, and there are literally thousands of products and complicated exercise routines aimed at given you rock-hard abs.

Begin Now To Tone the Tummy

With apologies to the latest ‘ab-blasting’ machine that you might have sees advertised on television, toning your abs is simple (note that simple is different from easy!), and doesn’t require any specialized equipment at all.

First of all let’s think about what the abdominal muscles are. They’re a group of muscles that lie between the bottom of our ribcage and our pelvis, right above where most of our organs for digesting food are.

During exercise, the abs are mainly used for flexing the spine, for example when we curl our body up in a sit-up or crunch, bringing our head closer to our knees. The abs are also worked during the negative motion as well; i.e. when we uncurl our body and go back to a prone or standing straight position. It’s exercises that use this motion that will tone the abs.

Here’s a simple but very effective ab workout:

1 Start in a prone position (i.e. lying down), on a reasonably soft surface such as a rubber exercise mat or simply a carpeted floor. The knees should be bent, but feet flat on the floor.

2 First lift you head off the ground, then continue the same motion by slowly curling your midsection so that your shoulders lift of the ground as well. You should feel your abdominals contract like a concertina.

3 Your lower back should not lift off the ground – when you the reach the point in the curl/crunch when it is about to, that’s when to stop. Your abs should be fully contracted. Pause for a couple of seconds, and return to the starting position, and then repeat.

In terms of repetitions, like any resistance exercise the best way to do an ab workout is until your form starts to break down. So when you can’t do another crunch while maintaining form and control over it, it’s time to stop. If this is taking longer than about 8-12 repetitions, a weight can be added. The simplest way of adding a weight is to hold a flat weight against the upper chest area, with the arms crossed in an ‘X’ over it and the hands gripping the top of the weight.

Aim to do about three sets of crunches in total, with a break in between each set of about two minutes. Because the abs are a relatively small muscle group, they can safely be exercised pretty often – you can do an ab workout about three times per week. Of course you should never do resistance exercises with a muscle group that still hurts from the last time you worked it though, as this can lead to injury.

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