Doing lower ab workouts and why this may actually be setting you up for failure is a question you may be wondering about. Most people focus on lower ab workouts when they want to get ripped abs thinking it’s logical - there’s a flabby problem area so let’s work in that area to fix it. But your body doesn’t operate that way. Flab means there’s fat so you need to lose the fat first and no amount of isolation exercises can burn that fat away.

A lot of ab machines and exercises are out there claiming they can solve your flab problem. However, because they work solely the ab area, you don’t see any visible difference after using their machines and workouts. In fact, they just don’t work because spot reduction really doesn’t work.

Training just the abs, will not give you rock hard abs. Isolation exercises like ab crunches or lower abdominal strengthening will strengthen your abs, but it will not give you the definition that you want. In fact, you may not notice a physical difference from training the abs only.

To sculpt and reveal those six packs, you need to get your whole body moving and do cardio activities, which will jumpstart your metabolism into burning fat continuously, allowing you to lose the fat cover around your ab muscles.

Doing exercises like squats, lunges, spit squats, chin-ups, push-ups, and step-ups, we train using more muscle groups, which will help us burn more calories. The more muscle groups we train, the more efficient our muscles will be at expending more energy and forcing our body to burn more fat to help fuel our physical activity.

Interval and circuit program training also raises your metabolism by challenging and keeping your muscles in a constant state of readiness to perform at any time. These quick, intense bursts of exercises (for example, jumping jacks-brisk walking-sprinting-jogging) work muscles hard causing lactic acid and carbon dioxide buildup, which needs to be cleared. More oxygen needs to be supplied to the muscles to keep them going. This ongoing cycle enlarges the muscles causing them to use up more fat as fuel.

The overall result is that the muscles work so hard during the exercise activity that the muscle must then be repaired and replenished when muscles are recovering. This replenishment of the muscles increases the body’s metabolism by forcing the body to burn fat to help the muscles repair and replenish.

When all is said and done, do we keep doing lower ab workouts and should we really be targeting something so specific? Current research says “no” and as far as sculpting six pack abs go, it definitely makes sense to lose the fat and the flab in order to allow the six packs to show through!

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