“How to Get Better Abs,” is a real attention getting headline, isn’t it? It’s not very original, but I’ll bet you that if you mosey on down to your local bookseller and check out the magazine rack, you’ll find at least a handful of health, fitness and beauty periodicals that feature some very close variation of this simple, five-word phrase.
The problem with this headline is that it is basically meaningless; a string of words without a cause or purpose. Better abs, as far as the media is concerned, are abs that you can see. You know, a six-pack. Six-packs are not better abs, they are simply visible abs. The visible abs that people are obsessed about aren’t any better, from a functional standpoint, than abs that are hidden under skin and a bit of adipose tissue.
A person with non-visible abs can be in better shape than a person with a six-pack. Looks have nothing to do with function and performance. Some of the greatest lies propagated by the media – and that’s saying a lot – deal with abs. Apparently, it helps sales when magazines blatantly lie and give false hope to countless people that there are easy, quick and possible ways to develop great looking abs.
I can’t imagine how must time people have wasted working on their abs based on the pap pushed in health and fitness magazines. And come on now people, how many times are you going to fall for this garbage? Month after month, year after year for decades these, “How to Get Better Abs,” articles have been pumped out by magazines without any changes.
The same exercises, the same routines – it’s embarrassing that the general public keeps buying this nonsense and it’s embarrassing that the fitness media keeps pumping it out. I have first-hand experience dealing with how the expectations of magazine editors don’t have much to do with health and fitness realities.
That’s another story for another time.
Suffice to say, the fitness media is a bad source for good information. Keeping it short, there are no quick and easy ways to get better abs and having visible abs – a six-pack – is a colossal waste of time. Any article that refers to better abs from an appearance perspective should be ignored.
I agree with you to an extent. There is no “quick and easy way” and all the crunches in the world won’t give you “six pack abs.” However, you can build up your ab muscles with proper exercise. Then if you combine that with proper diet and cardio, you will shed the layer of fat covering your sculpted abdominals, and have those 6-pack abs.
Assuming what you say is possible, the improvement to the appearance doesn’t yield any performance or functional benefits and the time spent in this pursuit would detract from time and effort spent on more important aspects of the workout.