Should You Do Weighted Ab Exercises For Six Pack Abs?

While most of us understand the importance of performing some type of exercises in order to obtain the goal of getting six pack abs, many of us don't know the best types of exercises to be performing.

Should you do declined sit-ups?

What about weighted ab crunches?

Is the exercise ball the optimal tool for six pack abs?

How about those ab-roller thingy's? Are they any good?

These are just some of the questions that you might find yourself asking. What is the best training method to get those illusive six pack abs showing?

Weighted Ab Work

Today, let's talk about weighted ab work.

Weighted ab work can basically be classified as any type of abdominal exercise where you're holding a weight or working against some form of additional resistance apart from your own body weight.

This may include using a cable-pulley system to do crunches, holding a plate across your chest as you crunch up and down, or placing a weighted ball between your leg as you do hanging leg raises.

All of these would be classified as weighted abdominal exercises, targeted towards six pack abs.

Building Ab Muscle Strength

The first point to consider is your overall ab strength. When it comes to this, weighted ab work is very good.

Not only are you getting the benefits of going through the movement as you normally would without weight, but that added resistance is really going to pose an additional challenge.

Secondly, since it will be increasing the intensity of your ab workouts, you'll likely burn more calories while doing them - another plus for weight loss.

Six Pack Ab Recovery

Next up, you need to factor in recovery. Remember the rule that you should not work a muscle group with weights within a 48 hour time period?

That rule will apply here.

While you might be able to get away with performing daily ab exercises without weight (although why you would want to do this is beyond me), you shouldn't be doing so when using weight.

Your ab muscles are just like other muscles in the body when weight is applied and will require the necessary recovery measures.

Six Pack Ab Appearance

Finally, the last factor, and probably the one you're most interested in, is how is all that weighted ab work going to make your muscles look?

This is where it makes a difference.

While weighted ab work would make your abdominal muscles grow more than if you weren't using weights (basically the muscle fibers will increase with size), this is often not the real problem for most people.

The real problem is that rather than having underdeveloped ab muscles, they've got a nice layer of comfortable fat covering them.

That's the reason they're not seeing six pack abs.

So, if your primary goal is to get that six pack ab appearance, you should be focusing more on getting on a good fat loss diet to help reduce your body fat levels.

If the truth is told, weighted ab exercises could actually make your waist look larger and wider in appearance, which is likely not what you're going for at all.

So, be sure to keep these points in mind.

Do weighted ab work if you want to develop more strength in your core. Focus on a proper diet and fat reducing workout program if you want to see your six pack abs showing through.

For complete six pack workout guidelines to follow, please see the Truth About Abs manual.