Too many weight loss articles focus on diet OR exercise for ways to look good – but not this one! For a flat tummy, and your overall wellbeing, you need to combine several elements and, luckily, you can find them all here.
1. Cut down your low-carb snack pile: According to Leslie Bonci, RD, at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Centre, low-carb bars and sweets often contain glycerine or sugar alcohols. Your body can’t full digest these elements, and so you tend to bloat as a result.
2. Run one mile less: Diana Taylor, RN, PhD, at the University of California-San Francisco Centre for Reproductive Health, points out, ‘Your body can interpret excessive exercise as stress, causing you to retain fluid and become constipated.’ Moderate exercise like walking or yoga, on the other hand, is good for your wellness, helping to speed things through your system and nix the problem.
3. Be careful with condiments: You can puff up from condiments as they are high in salt, so tread carefully.
4. Pick up more potassium: Found in tomatoes, bananas, salmon, almonds, and cherries, potassium is a natural diuretic that counteracts the belly-bulging effects of extra salt.
5. Drink more water: Although it sounds counterintuitive, drinking water makes you retain less water. This is because water transports bloat-causing elements such as salt out of your body.
6. Do crunches correctly: Loi Jordon, instructor and trainer at Equinox Fitness Centres in New York City, says you can get the twice the results in half the time if you take four counts to come up and four counts to come back down. At the hardest part of each crunch, you should do five to 10 small pulses. Also, make sure to keep your movements small. This isolates your abs and prevents other muscles from doing the work.
7. Streamline your stomach: Your abs will look slimmer if your posture is at its best. Try lying down on the floor – facedown – with your arms extended over your head. Then, using your back, lift your arms and legs a few inches off the floor. Release, then repeat and you’ll be walking tall in no time.
8. Give your abs rest and recovery time: You may think that you have to work your abs every day to make them rock-hard, but it’s only during rest that your muscles build. Kathy Kaehler, trainer and author of Kathy Kaehler’s Celebrity Workouts estimates, ‘Three to five days a week of consistent, dedicated abdominal training should get you strong, sleek abs.’
9. Don’t work your abs for too long: If you take half an hour to experience a good ab workout, you need to check your form, don’t use momentum and focus on quality rather than quantity. Kaehler asserts, ‘If it takes you that long to feel them working, you’re doing something wrong. I trained Jennifer Aniston about three days a week, and we did no more than five minutes of abs each time.’
10. Don’t go ultra-slow: While spending a little longer on crunches can achieve great results (see point number six), taking as much as a minute per crunch is less effective. The ideal outcome of a workout is that it enables you to do everything better, from kickboxing to picking up a suitcase, and you don’t do either of these things in slow motion.
11. Train your abs whenever you want: Many people think the end of the workout is the best time for training abs, but abs researcher and physical therapist Gilbert Willett, MS, associate professor at the University of Nebraska Medical Centre, notes, ‘It makes no physiological difference when you train abs, it only matters that you do it consistently. But if you do abs at the beginning of your workout, make sure you warm up first. Getting blood moving prevents many types of injuries during a workout.’
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