If you want to find your abs, you have to burn the fat. Eating right is critical, and by following the nutrition principles of the Abs Diet and centering your meals around the Abs Diet Powerfoods, you'll lose fat pretty effortlessly. But to maximize your weight loss and turn your fat into muscle, you need an exercise plan. Exercise will not only make you healthier; it'll make you lose weight faster. It'll make you stronger. Most important, it'll make your body turn fat into muscle -- by converting energy that's stored in fat into energy that feeds muscle.
The Abs Diet Workout Principles
Having worked at Men's Health for more than 10 years, I know all the latest trends in exercise, but I also scour the latest and most credible scientific research measuring the effectiveness of various workout plans. With that knowledge, I've constructed the exercise portion of the plan to help you burn fat at the highest levels possible in the least amount of time.
I know you don't have time to spend hours a day exercising, so I want you to get the most out of every workout. And I know that flexibility and convenience are the keys to formulating a plan you can stick to, so I've created a workout you can do in your local gym -- or in your living room. This plan allows you to keep your workouts short and focused, while still keeping you on target for your ultimate goal. Pound for pound, it's the best workout possible for finding your abs. These are the workout principles.
Focus on Your Diet First
The first 2 weeks of exercise are optional. If you already exercise regularly, you can jump right into the Abs Diet Workout, and you should, because you'll burn even more fat than with the Abs Diet alone. But if you're a beginner or you haven't exercised in a long time, take the first 2 weeks to adjust to your new eating plan before starting the workout. If you're champing at the bit to begin maximizing your weight loss, start getting in the exercise habit by walking briskly for up to 30 minutes a day.
Focus on Muscles
I used to work with a guy who was about 30 pounds overweight. He decided he'd enter a race as motivation to help him lose weight. He ran 6 days a week and followed his running program religiously, but he didn't lose a pound. Sure, he was able to run farther than he ever had, but his body stayed the same. Why? First, because he still based his diet around pizza, pasta, and wings, and second, because steady-state cardiovascular exercise doesn't burn fat the way strength training does. (Incidentally, when the same guy went on the Abs Diet and started a weight-lifting program, he lost nearly 20 pounds in less than 2 months.)
Your muscles are hungry little suckers, and in order to keep themselves well nourished, they want to churn and burn those calories you're ingesting. So the more muscle you have, the more calories you burn -- in the gym, on the job, even in bed. This program focuses on working your large muscle groups -- your legs, chest, back, and shoulders -- because that's where you can build the most muscle in the least amount of time. Plus, when you work your larger muscles, you fire up your metabolism by creating a longer calorie afterburn -- one that can last right up to your very next workout!
Think about the small fraction of time you spend exercising. Even if you work out four or five times a day for an hour at a time, that's nothing compared to the amount of time you're not exercising every day. So in order to gain the most metabolic benefit, you want to maximize the calories you're burning when you're not working out.
Focus on spending less time in the gym. The Abs Diet Workout employs two simple concepts to maximize muscle growth and fat-burning and minimize the time you spend exercising.
Circuit Training
This term refers to the practice of performing different exercises one right after another. For example, we'll have you do a set of leg exercises followed immediately by a set of an upper-body exercise, until you do 8 to 10 different exercises in a row. There are two reasons circuit training works. First, by keeping you moving and cutting down the rest periods between exercises, circuit training keeps your heart rate elevated throughout your training session, maximizing your fat burn while providing tremendous cardiovascular fitness benefits. Second, circuit training keeps your workout short -- you won't waste time resting between sets of an exercise, which means you can get on with the rest of your busy life.
Compound Exercises
Another key part of the strength-training program is compound exercises, that is, exercises that call into play multiple muscle groups rather than just focusing on one. For example, with the Abs Diet Workout, we don't want you to exercise your chest, and then your shoulders, and then your triceps, and then your forearms. We want you to hit many different muscles at the same time and then get out of the gym. One study showed that you can put on 6 pounds of muscle and lose 15 pounds of fat in 6 weeks by following an exercise program that employs the compound exercises found in the Abs Diet Workout. What's even better is that those subjects followed an exercise plan for only 20 minutes three times a week.
Not only do compound exercises make your workout more fun and more challenging, they will also increase the demands on your muscles -- even though you're not actually doing more work. (For instance, the squat hits a whopping 256 muscles with just one movement!)
Greater muscle demand triggers your body to produce more human growth hormone -- a potent fat burner.
If the only weight you've ever picked up is around your gut and not in the gym, don't worry that you're not familiar with working with weights. You can start by lifting any amount of weight that you're comfortable with -- whether it's a pair of light dumbbells or a couple of cans of beans. Even if you start small, you'll grow stronger, start to build muscle, and keep your metabolism revved. As you progress, you'll build and burn more.
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