LET'S TALK ABOUT BODY FAT

It's all about your body fat. This is why when you see a man with ridiculously ripped abs, guess what, the rest of his body is shredded too! This is because there is very little body fat between his skin and muscles. When you see a woman with buff shoulders, arms and legs, she will have wicked abs too! It's all about overall body fat. This is why if you want great abs, you must loose overall body fat.

This cannot be accomplished with doing a ton of sit-ups, crunches, side bends, or swivel twists. To slash overall body fat, you must do compound weight exercises that hit several muscle groups at the same, while sticking to a good diet. A few of my favorite compound lifts and a good place to start, are dead lifts, squats, bench press, lat pull-down, push-ups, pull ups and chin ups.

Working out with weights, body weight exercises or against resistance, increases lean muscle tissue and gives you a great cardio workout all at the same time. The more lean muscle tissue that you have, the faster your resting metabolism will be. Resting Metabolic Rate is how much energy your body requires just to function as well as how many calories and how much stored body fat gets used for baseline energy.

Vigorous strength workouts increase production of two key fat burning hormones: growth hormone and testosterone. Woman do produce testosterone, but in very tiny amounts. In greater amounts, these hormones will improve the body's efficiency at using stored fat for energy.

Intense training with weights recruits more fast twitch muscle fiber than do lengthy, steady paced cardio sessions, which rely mostly on slow twitch muscle fiber. Fast twitch muscle fiber requires more calories to function.

Lifting weights (which can include working out with resistance bands and cable machines too) shapes and hardens the body, creating the look of more fat lost than what actually shows up on the scale. This is because tight, toned muscle takes up less space than does loose, flabby muscle.

Here is a couple of questions for you about abdominal fat. What type of muscle burns more fat? A small, weak muscle (like in the abs) or a big naturally strong muscle (like in the thighs)? Slam dunk answer: the big naturally strong muscle. That which does not require much power does not require much energy. Low energy needs = tiny amounts of fat burned during exercise (like sit-ups). Tiny amount of fat burned = no change in the appearance of your mid-section.

Take away message: To shrink the stomach, focus on exercises that target the largest muscles of the body because they burn the most fat.