All About Your Abs
Author: Doctor Health
Your abdomen (or ‘abs’) is important to you. It is a big muscle that contains your stomach, liver and intestines, your kidneys and bladder, and your reproductive organs, and helps to protect them all. Keeping it in good shape can help you to look toned (it’s a good way to get a six-pack, in other words), and also to feel better in yourself.
Luckily, ab exercises are easy to do. The most popular is probably the ab crunch, which is when you lie flat on the floor, bend your legs and then touch your knees with your elbows. You can also try the simpler sit-up, which is the same thing, only putting your head between your knees each time instead. Which one you find easier will depend on your body – but it’s probably better for you if you practice whichever one you find the most difficult! This way you will tone-up your less-used muscles instead of focusing on ones that are already just fine.
You can also get various machines and gadgets that will help you in your ab exercises – the number is increasing every day, in fact. Some of these are good, while others are just expensive rubbish. As a rule, don’t buy anything that you haven’t tried out for yourself – which means that you can’t get that special deal from the shopping channel, unfortunately. Go to a shop and insist that you need to try out a few different ones before you make your decision, and if they refuse, just leave.
One last thing: it is important to realise that ab exercises are no good at all for losing weight. What you are doing is building muscle, not so much burning fat – although some fat is burned, the effect is negligible, and ab exercises certainly have no special effect on an overweight stomach.
Abdominal exercise devices are many in number and range form simple inflatable balls to complicated structures with springs hinges and hydrolic resistance mechanism.
The Exercise equipment industry also recognises the the motivation for many people to exercise is to reduce a growing layer of fat around the mid-section, so an obvious choice for any one looking to loose weight in this area would choose a device to directly taget this area.
Althogh this strategy seems to be logical, the effectiveness of an abdominal exercise device on the abdominal area is much less than one would think, in fact the effects of abdominal exercises are far less than that of walking, jogging or cycling for a similar level of perceved effort. The fact that most abdominal exercise devices use a muscle isolation form, will give a far greater feeling of a good workout because the lactic accid build up during exercise causes some discomfort which is normaly ascociated with vigerous exercise and thus giving a percieved level of exercise which has actually not depleted the normal level of blood sugar in the bodies energy system and thus not effected the bodies energy system to break down stored fat into usable energy.
Many people also use fitness product purchases as a means of motivation for a healthy lifestyle. I thin every one at some point in there life has bought something as a means of motivation a lifestyle change, when in actual fact these changes are usually short lived and have very litle effect. My advice would be to change your lifestyle then buy devices or gadgets to re-enforce the changes.
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