Ab exercises, also known as core exercises, are extremely important to the overall health and wellness of our bodies. Without a strong core, you could have bad posture which could increase the chances of injury. If you already have an injury or back issues, core exercises can be a source of corrective exercise to eliminate or greatly reduce pain. If you are not familiar with what your core is, it is all of your muscles from your chest to your knees, on the front side of your body as well as your back side. These are the muscles that keep you up straight all day long. They are called “core” because they are your core of stability. They are also endurance muscles and it is necessary to have a core program within your workout program to strengthen some of the most important muscles in your body.

Many people do ab exercises to reduce the inches in their midsection. Unfortunately, this is not the way to do this due to the fact that there is no way to spot reduce. The only way to decrease inches anywhere on our body, is to decrease the calories we consume by controlling our diet. Americans need to change their high fat diets as well as their consumption of sugars and simple carbohydrates. This type of diet causes excess body fat stores occurring especially in the midsection area. It is also important to increase the calories you burn from your exercise program with cardiovascular and resistance training exercises. This is the equation to weight loss and decreased inches. Core exercises will make sure that you are strengthening all of your abdominal muscles. Then, when you lose the weight, these exercises will help you get the definition and maybe even that 6-pack that you have been wanting for so long.

Be sure to add a core exercise program to your routine and you will be on your way to an all over healthy and toned body.

–By Sean Salazar, CPT, NASM

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 6th, 2010 at 5:45 am and is filed under Perfect Fit News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.