Pilates, the exercise specifically tailored to work your mid-section or core, have become extremely popular all over the globe. Gone are the days of working out your core, or abdominals and any muscles surrounding them, by doing laborious, back breaking sit-ups and exhausting crunches. To obtain the rock hard abs made popular by the movie “300″ and hunky Spartan warriors shown on the big screen, many people are concentrating solely on their abs and not much else in order to obtain the ever elusive and hard to get “six-pack”.
But the truth about core training is that most people will never obtain the abdominal muscles they desire simply by doing crunches or other core work. In reality, most people won’t see a speck of improvement in their midsection if all they do is core training. This is a dirty little secret that any Washington, DC fitness coach or personal trainers are aware of. But they let people, even encourage them to keep doing crunches because they are selling the fantasy of the six-pack, and fantasies are very popular as well as profitable.
Why you can’t get a Flat Stomach with Crunches
There are many contributing factors to obtaining the unicorn of muscle sculpting, the six-pack. Most people will never accomplish this feet. The six-pack really does require a ton of dedication and hard work including years of training, eating right and the thing many people omit from the “How to obtain a Six-Pack” speech, good genes. So instead of daydreaming about the six-pack, we should really simply be concentrating on a flat and toned stomach!
The biggest waste of time when working out at the gym or at home, thinking you will lose the pounds and inches, is only core training. The midsection or abdominal region seems to collect fat quicker than any other part of the body, especially in men. This seems to be evident in the amount of men sporting the beer belly look and their determination in getting rid of that “spare tire”. They are so desperate to get rid of their ever growing abdomen that they work out only on those muscles without realizing that it is really doing nothing but making them work extra hard and seeing no results.
Everyone has abdominal muscles but you can’t always see them because they are located under a layer of fat. Getting rid of the fat layer that is on top of your core is really the only way to get a flat stomach or the mystical six-pack. Simply working these muscles with core training, though making your muscles a little stronger, will not get rid of this layer enough to be seen by the naked eye.
Our bodies work a certain way when it comes to losing weight. The way it doesn’t work is losing weight in just one area by only working out that specific part. Target weight loss is a myth and cannot be achieved. When one drops weight, it isn’t just in one area, it’s in all areas.
There are many workouts that can help you to achieve the weight loss that you desire. Anything in the cardiovascular family will certainly do this for you. Running, walking, swimming, using an elliptical, or jumping rope are all effective, popular and proven ways to keep your heart rate up and help you burn the calories needed to lose weight. Core training alone does not provide the calorie burning needed to achieve weight loss.
The truth about core training is that it can also damage the neck and spine if the exercises are not perfectly performed, and we all know when we start to get tired our form is the first thing to suffer. If you have preexisting back or neck problems, you should not attempt to do core work, it will often aggravate your condition.
Core training is a waste of your gym and working out time. To those people that are concentrating solely on core training, please stop and try picking up some cardio to burn that fat that you want to lose. It is about time you started seeing results from your workouts.
