Six pack shortcuts

Bye cold winter days, hello lovely spring sun! It's time to exchange your winter coat for a six-pack, but how do you actually get a visible six-pack?

Six-pack shortcut 1: start with dieting

It shouldn't be news that everyone has abs. Your fat percentage determines the visibility of your abdominal muscles. The lower your fat percentage, the more visible your abs become. Start with a diet to lower your fat percentage.

During these diets, your calorie burn is higher than your calorie intake, so that your body uses the reserves (read: fat). This reduces your fat percentage and BAM!; slowly your six-pack will appear!

Incidentally, this is not always a guarantee for a six pack. How many 'blocks' you have is genetically determined. Arnold Schwarzenegger, for example, had only four visible blocks, despite his very low fat percentage.

Six-pack shortcut 2: increase your metabolism

As you have read in point onhe, your fat percentage plays a major role in the visibility of your abdominal muscles. By increasing your metabolism (or fat burning), you reach your goal faster. Compound exercises such as the squat and deadlift engage a large part of your body. This burns a lot of calories.

How many calories this are exactly differs per person. Gender, age and body weight play a role in this, but also the intensity of the training. On average, you burn 200 to 250 calories with 15 minutes of squatting and deadlifting.

Six-pack shortcut 3: train your abs

Finally, training the abdominal muscles is mentioned. As contradictory as it may sound, training the abs is not a priority for getting a visible six pack. However, you can fine-tune the abs by training the abdominal muscles .

Your abs are made up of straight and oblique muscles, both lying on the surface and deeper. To train all these muscles, it is wise to vary in isolation exercises. Sit-ups are seen as a basic abdominal exercises, with which you train the straight abdominal muscles. Also Leg raises are here ideally suited for. Planking also appeals to the deeper abdominal muscles. Oblique crunches and stick twists appeal to - you guessed it - oblique abs.

By doing abdominal exercises you do not immediately burn belly fat. Local fat burning is not possible. So it has no added value to target your abdominal muscles every workout. In fact; this will eventually backfire as your abs have no rest. As a result, they do not recover optimally, which is at the expense of the development of your six-pack.

You also engage the abdominal muscles by doing compound exercises, because they have a stabilizing role. In addition to this, you can do the above isolation exercises one to three times a week, with three to five sets at a time as a guideline.

Six-pack shortcut 4: eight to twelve reps

Your abs mainly consist of type 2B muscle fibers. This type of muscle fiber responds best to a lot of resistance and few repetitions. The abdominal muscles are often wrongly trained at a large volume, so less resistance and more repetitions. As a result, the abdominal muscles are not optimally stimulated. For building muscle mass, it is a good idea to use a guideline of eight to twelve reps per set. If this number of repetitions is too easy for you, add more resistance to make the exercise harder.

Also take a look at our weight loss products . As they say: “Abs are made in the kitchen”.