Ab Exercises For Women

There is a lot of confusion out there about the best ab exercises for women. What most women want is to have flat, sexy abs and have been taught to do hours of cardio and hundreds of crunches to get there. This is not the most effective way to get flat, sexy abs. When you do cardio, you need to take a different approach to increase the fat burning effect and you need new ab exercises. I will give you some ideas for mixing up your cardio workout and tell you what I think are the best ab exercises for women.

Let's start with cardio because this is the where many women spend hours a day trying to walk (or run) away their belly fat. As I said above, this is not the best way to get rid of belly fat. Cardio can be good for burning fat, but you have to get your body into fat burning mode before that happens. This can take up to 20 minutes so if you are only doing 20 minutes of cardio, you may not be burning any fat.

Another problem with cardio is that if you do it at a steady pace, your body adapts to what you are doing and you don't get as much benefit as you would if you change intensity. One good method is to change intensity every minute or two. For example, start out slow to warm up, then speed up every a couple minutes until you are going as fast as you can. After you exercise at peak intensity for a couple minutes, slow down to warm up speed and start the process over. This will give you a much more intense workout that burns more calories and more fat than a steady pace.

Even though I just down played cardio exercise, it is still important to do. Just focus on high intensity or interval type training and you will get better results. You should only do this 3 or 4 days a week and plan on doing something that will help you burn fat 24 hours a day at least 2 or 3 days a week. I am talking about strength training.

Just like with men, the best ab exercises for women focus on building muscle. This will give you a firmer body and build the muscle that I just mentioned would burn fat all day long. You don't need to go to the gym and pump iron like a body builder, but you do need to make your muscles stronger. You can easily accomplish this without weights if you want. Doing simple, body weight only exercises like squats, push ups, lunges, and crunches will give you a really good full body workout without ever picking up a dumbbell. You can even do the exercises quickly, changing from one exercise to the next without a break and get your heart rate up and get a cardio workout while you are strengthening your muscles.

Building strong muscles really is the best ab exercise for women and men. It firms up your body and helps you burn fat so the next time somebody asks you what the best ab exercises for women are, you can tell them how to change their workout routine and their physique.