six pack, fitness, training How long does it take to achieve a 'six-pack' and how can you reach that goal? Image: Pexels
Well-designed abs and more precisely the famous "six-pack" are the unsurpassable dream of sports enthusiasts. However, you can't get chocolate bars without effort, hard work or sacrifice.
Studies show that it takes between 3 and 12 weeks to build new muscles and that fat loss is sustainable, with a maximum weight gain of one kilo per week.
Obtaining ostensible abs is, in fact, part of these two processes, but they require more time, because it is estimated that to have dream abs, you must not have more than 10% body fat.
The time required to reduce the level of body fat does not depend only on training. It is closely correlated with food but also, and this is where the problem lies, with purely genetic factors. Not everything depends on you, that's how it is.
Depending on its initial situation, we can expect, at the earliest, results after about thirty days. But sculpting a six-pack of steel in such a short time is hard, and if you do it badly, it can last longer.
We are certainly more likely to see them appear by working hard in training several days in a row, but be careful, you may well see them disappear as soon as you stop your intensive exercises.
If your goal is to draw your abdominals, you must find a sustainable method to ensure muscle growth, while prioritizing well-being, leaving aside everything that can harm your physical and mental health, such as manias, complexes, all-cadyingness and emotional instability.
Change your diet
The biggest mistake we often make is to expect the abs to appear as if by magic. However, to achieve such a perfected life goal, it is necessary to adopt a healthy life diet: sleep more and better, have a balanced diet and drink more water, among other things. Training is not enough: background changes are required to rejuvenate your health and athletic abilities.
Priority to proteins therefore, to increase the feeling of satiety, nourish your muscles and recover properly after training. The dose? One gram or more per kilogram of body mass. Do not forget fruits and vegetables, nor carbohydrates and fats, to ingest in thoughtful quantities.
Because many people make a misast by eliminating carbohydrates from their diet when they try to lose fat.
However, pasta, rice or bread can be your friends, and break up with friends in a brutal, perhaps counterproductive way: they come back to torment you in your fancy moments, pushing you to commit the worst sin, snacking between meals, the ultimate obstacle to all your good resolutions. Eat everything, in moderation. Carbohydrates provide us with energy, in our life as well as in our sport. May they be thanked for it.
What about training?
We often tend to favor cardio to lose fat. Certainly, cardio is also our friend, but we never have enough. We must first favor bodybuilding and then add exercises that make the heart work to help melt fat.
One of the pitfalls concerning sport is to devote yourself entirely to a type of training from which miraculous effects are expected. In truth, it is necessary, in sport as in everything, to show measure and balance, and exercise all your gymnastic faculties.
Similarly, do not make the mistake of focusing only on the abdominals every day. The most effective method is to train the entire trunk, which exercises that are too targeted fail to do.
Compound exercises that improve our general physical condition, such as squats, ground lifts or bench press are also good resources. These exercises help burn fat and work the center of the body, demanding balance and stability.
To these training sessions, some basic functional exercises must be added, including rotation and extension movements. You will thus train all the trunk functions, and you will, for sure, become a much more accomplished athlete, including outside the dedicated rooms.
We start with a small detail, the drawn abs, the embossed pattern of the chocolate bar printed on the skin by protruding muscles, a common desire to please, to arrive at a real upheaval in the walk of your life: it is a question of becoming the athlete you have (always) dreamed of being.
It is more useful to set sporting goals than aesthetic ones. Because aesthetics has a subjective dimension. But in its scientific rigor, sports activity surpasses it while producing it and eventually resulting in aesthetic results.
The physiques we admire are the result of a training that aims to tone the whole body, and translate a way of life that gives primacy to well-being, health, physical and mental, and not to simple appearance.
[Via GQ France]
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