While men don’t often have this issue, most women have a tendency to collect fat in the lower ab area. Many times you will see it called a “pooch” and reducing lower ab fat is often challenging.

 The first step in reducing this lower ab fat is to go on a healthy diet.
Besides reducing calorie intake and balancing food groups, lower ab bulge can be reduced by flushing the system. Most people have undigested food in their intestines. Adding fiber and drinking water can serve to flush the system, thus reducing the size of the lower belly.  Now this will reduce the size of the belly area due to a swelling or filling up of the intestines but flushing doesn’t actually get rid of the fat, However you can often see a 2-3 inch difference after a flush or 3 day detox diet.

Always remember that in order to reduce fat anywhere on the body you will need to take in less calories than your body uses, so if you use a 2 pronged attack by lowering your calorie intake and then adding exercise to your day you will begin to burn off the low ab fat.

While exercise can help you burn more calories it can also help to tone and tighten muscles.  Now you may have heard that “spot toning” exercises can’t help you lose weight from a particular area of your body and that is true but remember that you will be watching what you eat so in addition to tightening your lower ab area you will also be burning off the fat.  So exercise is an important part of reducing your lower ab fat  – pooch.

Many gyms have machines suited for the lower abdomen, particularly if the gym is specific to women’s fitness needs. However, there are two simple exercises that can be done at home or in combination with a specific fitness program.

Lower Ab Crunches

• Lie on the back. The exercise surface should be firm so as to support the spine. Place the hands under the buttocks, palms facing down.

• Lift the legs so as to form an L shape with the body.

• Tightening the stomach muscles gently lift the buttocks with the stomach muscles. The hands should only serve as a support for the lower back, whose majority should remain on the ground. The legs should remain straightened.

• Continue the exercise as many times as needed, but for no longer than thirty seconds before the next round. The next round should take place after a thirty second break.

Lower Ab Leg Lift

• Lie on the back. The surface should be firm as to support the spine. Place the hands palms down underneath the buttocks. These are not meant to help in the exercise. The hands are only meant to support the lower back.

• Tightening the stomach muscles, lift the legs in a folding motion toward the ceiling. Keep the legs straight.

• Return the legs back to the ground.

• Continue the exercise as many times as needed, but for no longer than thirty seconds. Take a thirty second break before the next round.

Alongside a healthy diet, these two exercises can play a huge part in reducing lower ab fat.

Here is an excellent video that will walk you through lower ab exercises.  It has over 7 million views and is very popular ( and effective). Sometimes when you watch a video you get a better idea on how to do an exercise correctly.

In closing – remember to watch what you eat so that you can start burning off the fat, and then add in lower ab exercises to tighten and firm. In just a few short weeks you should see a big difference in the way that your pants feel and your lower ab looks.

Conventional wisdom states that you can improve on what you don’t track – if you are not tracking your exercise in an exercise diary, then how can you improve it?

Exercise has multiple benefits from increased muscle strength, decreased weight, and improved health.  But who stays on a program for more than a week?

Research shows that if you can maintain an activity for 30 days you’ll be more likely to stick with it.  And, if you can maintain an activity for 60 days it will be harder to stop the habit than to continue.

This is one reason an exercise diary can be critical to your success.  You may think that an exercise diary only includes the workout that was done but there is so much more that can be recorded.

Recording exercise helps you to notice trends in your performance.  If you rate your performance through both objective and subjective criteria you’ll notice differences between your actual performance and how you felt that you performed.

Diaries can be retrospective (historical) and prospective (future).  In other words you can use the diary to record a plan for your workout and then record the actual routine.  Using this strategy people new to an exercise routine have a greater chance of continuing the program.

The diary acts somewhat like an accountability partner.  The routine is written down and if you neglect to start or complete it you must also record your results.  Using the diary to maintain your focus increases your chances of success.

Exercise diaries also help to highlight weaknesses in both your program and your abilities.  Keeping track of your performance in different activities will indicate your abilities.  And that same information will show you how quickly or slowly you are progressing.

Motivation is a problem for many people who are exercising or new to an exercise routine.  Doing the same thing day after day can be monotonous.  Recording your objective data and watching the changes can often times increase your desire to continue.  You can also change your routines and be assured that you have a record of what really worked and what doesn’t.

Exercise diaries should include objective data such as heart rate before, during and after; the amount of time you spent exercising, any resistance (weights) you may be using, time of day you are exercising and measurements of your arms, thighs, waist and hips over time.

Subjective data should include how you feel before, during and after exercise.  You can use a numeric rating system to be able to compare your ‘feelings’ over time.  Now you can evaluate when your top times to exercise are based on your rating system.

Exercise diaries give you the edge to improve your program, increase your motivation, determine your best workouts and times, track your progress and begin a life changing habit.

Remember that keeping an exercise diary only takes 2-3 minutes per entry, yet you can gain so much in return.
They say that those who keep an exercise diary compared to those that don’t reach their goals more quickly and also keep with their fitness workouts much longer.

If you don’t want to call it an exercise diary – call it an exercise log. It doesn’t matter what you call it. Just remember to do it.

Circuit training is an intensive form of fitness training that combines cardio and strength training in which a set of exercises is completed one right after the other. Each exercise is performed for a specified number of repetitions or for a prescribed time before you move on to the next exercise.

For many athletes and fitness buffs, circuit training is a great way to give yourself a total body workout (both aerobic and strength training) in a short workout.

A lot of people feel that if they don’t spend at least an hour or more working out at the gym that they won’t see results. But that is not true. You can do a concise intense short circuit training work out and get an even better session than you might get from from a slow workout for an hour and a half at the gym.

Circuit training is a workout that puts together lifting weights and aerobics. In a circuit training workout you do your exercises quickly and you don’t rest a lot between sets of exercises.

Circuit training is a really tough but very effective workout. Some people avoid circuit training because it is such a challenge. Others love circuit training because even though it can push you really hard – it is much shorter than a traditional workout and many feel that they can do anything for a short period of time especially when they see the fabulous results of this type of workout. Circuit training has been found to burn fat faster and build shapely muscle more quickly than almost any other type of workout for the amount of time invested.

To engage in a circuit training workout that will really get you results, you want to start with a three to five minute warm up and then do five minutes of cardio that builds in intensity – this gets your heart and body ready for the circuit. A sample circuit training workout could have two to three complete circuits with each circuit containing six strength training exercises and six cardio exercises that are completed one right after the other with little or no rest in between. You could complete a workout like this in as little as twenty to thirty minutes while burning hundreds of calories.

Circuit training is a fantastic option for getting a total body workout if you are short on time. You just can’t beat circuit training for an effective efficient workout!

In my practice I have never advocated to a patient that his goal in fitness should be to satisfy the people who have devised any given set of capabilities. This is not because I do not strongly advocate participation in any and all forms of physical recreation. All types of therapy, be they pill or scalpel, must be predicated on the needs of and advantages to the individual. This is also true of exercise.

My own practice ranges from athletes on the United States Olympic Team to patients who are bedridden with a variety of serious ailments. But many of my bedridden patients are in as good shape for them and their potentialities as are the Olympic athletes.

Physical fitness is judged on a sliding scale. One patient in particular has a flair for zestful, vigorous living. As an indirect result of his participation in World War I, he eventually required bilateral amputations of his legs above the thighs. But when he came to our summer cottage, this handicap as always was of secondary importance. Having divested himself of his artificial limbs, he would be carried by a couple of the younger men to the end of the dock and unceremoniously dumped. After the initial horrendous splash, he would bob to the surface, sputter a bit, and then make off for deep water.

Your own base line or yardstick is you at this moment. From now on you improve, you deteriorate, or you hold the line. This is where you start. And a medically sound beginning it is.

Consciously or unconsciously each sportsman has devised his own fitness testing. It may be formal (one more push-up, lopping two seconds off his hundred-yard swimming time, or returning to normal pulse less than three minutes after exercise) or informal (“it sure was easier to climb Mount Yahoo this year!”)—but it is there.

The most currently inept fitness enthusiast can outline his own testing program by using the following rules:

1. Measure areas relevant to your own recreational activity.

If you bicycle, time yourself once in a while over the same route. Do not think that a certain number of deep knee bends will greatly improve your ability to pitch a pup tent.

2. Always test yourself under the same conditions. Time of day, mood, weather, recent sleeping habits, and many other factors should be as similar as possible.

3. Measure for greater endurance. If you are now able to dog-paddle for 21 minutes, see if you can up this to 22 minutes. Or if you are weight-lifting 20 pounds ten times, see if you can press eleven times.

4. Measure for greater strength. If you are now completing six laps of the pool in 21 minutes, how about six and a half laps in the same time? If you are now pressing 20 pounds ten times, how about 25 pounds ten times?

5. Measure your own improvement. Fitness tests should not compare one sportsman with another or be used on a one-shot basis. Repeated evaluations are the key to good fitness tests. They should be used as a guide for the individual sportsman in his evaluation of self-improvement. In fact, most sportsmen know their general condition without ever resorting to formal testing.

6. If you are seeking general fitness, then devise over-all tests. Fitness should be total and not restricted to one area of the body. It makes little sense to work the legs hard without paying some attention to the arms. In testing yourself, test arms, trunk, and legs.

7. Make the goals simple enough to accomplish in a few weeks—or you will go stale and lose interest. A fifty-year-old executive who has been sedentary for twenty years may find a single push-up impossible. And it might take him six discouraging months to be able to do two. Obviously he should be doing “modified push-ups” rather than regular push-ups

If the above suggestions are incorporated into your own program of fitness evaluation, more technically scientific methods are unnecessary. However, properly understood, these tests do have value. Perhaps you may wish to adapt portions of them for yourself.

There are three excellent reasons everyone should be cutting down their workout sessions if they want to build muscle.

1. Growth hormone and testosterone levels peak at about 40 minutes into a workout and start declining after an hour. After one hour, muscle building hormones begin stopping and muscle eating hormones begin starting up. People that trains 90 minutes to 2 hours are “taking two steps forward, 1 step back”.

2. Cutting down marathon gym sessions gives you the extra time to pursue your other goals, gives you time to hang out with your family and friends, go to a movie or do something different all together.

3. Your enthusiasm towards working out will be negatively effected by prolonged training sessions. Even if you truly enjoy working out, you’ll probably lose motivation to train altogether if you spend all your time in the gym.

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You know that you have been working hard on your body and you have reached a good level but you just can’t seem to get any bigger. You have increased your workout days and also the amount of time spent but still no luck

Instead of running out and getting creatine or any other stimulant product have you thought of Gakic caps? There is no cycling time, no loading and no maintenance phases, Gakic caps as it works immediately.

Gakic caps works through your normal fatigue threshold and blasts through it so that you can reach the next level.

If you haven’t be able to see the results that you are working so hard for you may want to try Gakic caps.
Push past your weight lifting plateau with Muscletech Gakic Caps, $5.00 off!

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A set of dumb bells will be needed for this exercise. The weight of the dumb bells should be comfortable: they should both pose a challenge and leave room for growth.

• Stand with a straight posture, eyes and toes forward. The feet should be shoulder width apart, and a weight should be in each hand and arms should be hanging close to your outer thighs.

• Tighten the stomach as much as possible while allowing for natural breathing. The stomach should remain tight while in movement.

• Bend from side to side from the waist and hold for 2-3 seconds.

• Continue the exercise for 25 repetitions on each side and do 2 sets to start.

• Loosen the stomach muscles after each rep and break for thirty seconds before restarting.

While doing this exercise, it’s necessary to keep both feet firmly on the ground and remember to breathe naturally. It is often recommened that you work up to a total of 100 reps per day for best results. If you currently have any back or other health issues you should consult with your health care provider before starting any exercise program including this one.
Although the term “Love Handles” may sound cute, holding hands may be a better option then having your partner hold your roll of fat.

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The purpose of the heart is to pump blood from the venous system into the arterial system. The total output of that pump is called cardiac output. It’s measured in volume of blood per minute. Your heart rate is the main means by which your body increases the circulation of blood.

From low heart rates to intermediate heart rates, the heart is able to increase the circulation by increasing the stroke volume – the amount of blood ejected by the heart into the arterial system each time the heart beats. Up to 90 beats a minute, you’re getting a strong assist from the stroke-volume increase. After 90, this influence is less and less.

After 130, if you’re not in good shape, the circulation is increased by heart rate alone. At a heart rate of 130 or higher, the heart is beating so fast that it doesn’t have time to fill any greater volume, so the amount of blood the heart puts out varies in direct proportion to the number of beats per minute. It’s a lot more efficient for the heart to have both systems, the stroke-volume increases and the pulse-rate increases, working to increase its output.

Now the effects of conditioning become obvious. If you’re well conditioned, you can extend this contribution of stroke volume up to 140 beats a minute because of the more efficient coordination of the fibers of the heart. If the heart is in poor condition, then stroke-volume contribution may quit at 120 beats a minute.

Beyond 170 to 180 beats a minute, cardiac output doesn’t increase even if your heart beats faster. You’ve reached the limit of venous return to the heart.

The heart may go above 200 beats a minute. Heartbeats as high as 230 have been recorded during exercise. Each person has his own maximum. It’s not important that you can get your heart rate up to 220 and I can get mine only to 210 or that someone else can get his only to 190. Many top athletes can’t get their heart rates above 190.

Maximum heart rate is not an index of physical fitness. Long-term training may have no effect at all on increasing your maximum heart rate. Maximum heart rate lowers as you age; studies of a large population in Sweden have demonstrated that the average maximum heart rate drops about one beat per minute each year. The reason why it decreases with age isn’t well understood, but it has no bearing on your capacity to function, in any case.

For large adult population, the average maximum heart rate is approximately 220 beats a minute minus the person’s age. This isn’t an ideal figure, or a goal, or one to put into competition.

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