Q: I’m an 18-year-old male. I have a little bit of belly fat. I can see my top two abs when I tense. My question is, how can I get a six pack by spring break? What do I need to do? – Will

A: A six pack by spring break? Doable! Get ready to shed excess fat and build muscle—the two keys to a “fast track” six pack.

P.S. You probably already have a six pack underneath that “little bit of belly fat.” Especially if you can see definition in the top abs. Ready to bring it forth?

Attack the Flab Around Your Midsection

1. High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT). Interval cardio will burn more fat than steady state cardio (like running or cycling at a steady pace). And, you’ll build more muscle. Interval cardio consists of short bursts of high intensity exertion, followed by brief periods of “active” rest. This keeps the body off balance so it can’t adjust and hoard calories, and it also works multiple muscle groups. Best of all, not only will you burn more fat during a HIIT workout,  you’ll get EPOC, or excess post-exercise oxygen consumption. What does that mean? More calorie burn post-workout! Get the full scoop in our metabolic circuit post.

2. Eat Healthier. Skip the refined sugar (what’s that?), the fries and other junk food, and focus on maintaining a healthy, well-rounded diet. It’s important to incorporate lots of variety into your meals to make sure you get ample nutrients. We recommend eating 5-6 smaller meals throughout the day, instead of 2-3. This will enhance your metabolism, reduce unhealthy cravings, and deliver plenty of energy for your workouts. You’ll want to steer clear of carbonation, as well—soda and beer are the enemies of a washboard stomach!

3. Drink Green Tea. It’s a metabolism-booster and antioxidant with proven stomach fat-blasting benefits. Don’t like the taste? You can take Green Tea in extract form, on its own or as a compound supplement (get it at any grocery store). Read more about the benefits of green tea.

While you’re losing that little bit of excess fat, you can jump right into your ab muscle workouts! Lean muscle mass burns more calories, so your strength training will fuel your fat burn.

4 Moves for a Rock-Solid Stomach

1. Keep Your Abs Engaged. Your core region (lower back, abs and glutes) make up your “stabilizer” muscle group. This powerhouse is constantly at work when you’re doing ANY kind of workout, so take advantage of this! When you’re lifting weights, or doing anything that uses your stabilizer muscles, consciously tap into that strength—keep your abs tight and posture solid, and you’ll see big results.

2. Use Compound Movements.  When targeting your abs, compound exercises are better than isolated ones. Why not work multiple muscle groups at once? Some compound movements that work the whole ab region include Planks and the Bicycle Maneuver:

• For Planks, lie face down, forearms and toes pressed into the floor, and lift your hips up off the floor. Engage your abs, straighten your back and hold this position for as long as you can. Trust us, you’ll feel your entire ab region engaged! When you progress, you can also try a plank variation using an exercise ball.
  

• For Bicycle Maneuver, lie with your back on the floor, hands behind your head and elbows spread wide. Keeping your lower back pressed into the floor and abs contracted, crunch across the body—one elbow to the opposite knee. Alternate continuously. This will work more muscles than a standard crunch.

3. Eat Protein.  Protein will allow your body to rebuild muscle after your workouts. Great sources include lean meat, nuts, eggs, cheese and legumes. Another excellent source of protein is a protein shake, which can be one of your 5-6 daily meals. A whey or soy protein powder, when mixed with soy or skim milk, can give you roughly 20 grams of protein. Drink your protein shake at the right time for maximum results.

4. Get Plenty of Rest.  “Fast-track” doesn’t mean you need to work out every single day. If you work the same muscle group two days in a row, you’ll make it hard for your body to recover—which is when the actual muscle development takes place. If you are committed to working out every day, do cardio or active stretching on the days in between your strength training workouts. And make sure you get the right amount of sleep, too, because it’s prime muscle recovery time.

You’ve got a big goal, but it should be easy to get a six pack quickly if you follow these steps diligently. (It will require the same determination to keep that six pack when you return to school, of course!)

Get a six-pack your own way with a little push from 4-Hour Body.

More good reads:

• Are you training your core or your abs?
• Ab-blasting got you sore? How to prevent second-day soreness
• Is Final Phase Fat Loss the ticket to your six-pack?

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Q:

A: There are many ways to calculate your body fat percentage. This test from Health Central is a good place to start: enter your stats and a few measurements and it will calculate your body fat percentage with a very narrow margin of error.

Health Central says 18% body fat is in the healthy normal range for Asian men, 15% for Caucasian men, and 12% for African-American men. And for the ladies: 25% is healthy for Asian women, 22% for Caucasian women, and 19% for African-American women. According to this site, Asians tend to have a slightly higher percent body fat than African-Americans and Caucasians, because their bones are less dense. So, Jon, if this test gives you 15%, you’re definitely in the healthy range.

If you’re worried about the rolls, keep in mind that a little bit of extra flesh is normal when you bend forward or sit down. There’s gotta be a little give!

Furthermore, if your abdomen is flat when standing, then the folds and lingering lines could have more to do with the elasticity of your skin than with fat. When your skin loses elasticity, it doesn’t contract as much when you sit or bend, and it doesn’t bounce right back when you stand back up—the fold lines stick around for a while. This happens with age, certain skin types, and dehydration. Drinking plenty of water and using moisturizer can improve skin elasticity.

And, of course, keep working on that taut stomach with nutrition and exercise. A few recommendations:

AB-FRIENDLY FOODS

For starters, go easy on starchy carbs, carbonated beverages, and sodium. Instead, drink lots of water and look into the fat-blasting benefits of green tea, which you can easily get in supplement form.

To lose a few extra pounds, Core Performance’s Joe Kita swears by incorporating fiber into your diet. “Fiber’s bulk naturally fills you up, so you eat less,” he explains. Another great way to scale back the munchies—while shedding excess fat and increasing abdominal muscle—is a weight loss protein shake. IdealShape has a great one; be sure to read up on its nutritious ingredients.

You can also check out MSN Health’s flat ab food fixes. And finally, remember that your eating habits are just as important as what you eat. This post will tell you when and how much to eat to keep your stomach slim.

EXERCISE FOR A TONED TUMMY

If you’re trying to lose excess fat, you should absolutely be doing interval cardio and metabolic circuit training. Find out why they’re better than steady state cardio for whittling down stubborn fat.

Next, check out these solid tips for driving away that last bit of belly fat, and putting a six pack in its place.

And finally, don’t forget to track your results!

Easy Ways to Score a Six-Pack

Is Sugar the Enemy of Your Slim Figure?

The Real Reason Your Belly Fat Won’t Budge

My details:

Gender: M

Age: 23

Height: 5’11″

Weight: 200 lbs.

I started working out a few days back, burning 500 calories every day. My daily intake is around 1,500 calories. I’m doing weights also. – Raj

A: Unfortunately, the midsection is where most guys tend to put on the pounds. But there are lots of ways to send that fat packing!

Here are some of our favorite middle-fat-blasters:

Skip the Steady State Cardio – When it comes to trimming your midsection, high-intensity interval training (HIIT) is a better use of your gym time. So bypass the stationary machines and triple your fat burn with routines like metabolic circuits.

Add Green Tea to Your Diet – The evidence supporting green tea’s fat-blasting properties is irrefutable. The only question is, should you sip a cup or take green tea extract?

Work That Core – Find out how to blast stomach fat and put a six-pack in its place!

Eat More Protein – Protein shakes are an efficient, easy way to get your protein, which boosts fat loss by helping you build lean muscle mass. Be sure to have a protein shake within 60 minutes of your resistance training workout for maximum muscle recovery.

Suppress Your Sweet Tooth – We all know sugar makes us gain weight, but the reasons may surprise you!

Double Up with Compound Exercises – We’re glad to hear you’re doing strength training on top of your cardio. Lifting weights is a good way to tone your chest, abs and back—not just your arms and shoulders. But in order to make the most of your lifting, you need to focus on getting full-body results.

A Note About Your Diet

Are you eating enough of the right foods? Nutrition is key to losing weight and staying healthy, and it’s about more than caloric intake. To begin with, try to cover all your bases: the government offers helpful dietary guidelines, and they’ll also tell you how much of each food group to eat based on your age, sex, height and activity level.

Next, calculate your caloric need. Remember, you only need to consume 300-500 less than your caloric need in order to lose excess fat. As a tall, young male, you probably need more than 1,500 calories a day, especially if you’re burning 500 of them! Eat too few calories and you’re just as likely to gain/keep weight because you’ll send your body into starvation mode. Your metabolism will slow down and your body will hoard fat.

What you want to do is keep your metabolism high. To do that, meet your caloric need, stay active throughout the day on top of exercise, and eat 5-6 small, healthy meals. One of those meals can be a nutritious protein shake. And whatever you do, don’t skip breakfast!

Sticking to Your New Fitness Routine

Since it sounds like you’ve just kicked your exercise regimen up a notch, we thought we’d give mindset a mention. Frame of mind is often overlooked in fitness, and yet it’s the most important aspect: staying on track is the only way to achieve and keep your results. Once you’ve geared your mind for weight loss, you’re ready to apply these tips from other experts about starting a new regimen and staying on track.

Good luck, and keep us posted on your progress! We want to hear what works for you and what doesn’t.

Abs Are Out, Core Is In! Find Out Why

Unspoken Rules at the Gym

Which Fruit Ingredient Can Help You Lose Weight?

The secret to weight loss is… grapes?

What is it about red wine that yields such great health benefits? The French seem to know the secret. According to CBS News, it was 18 years ago that 60 Minutes first made the connection between their high wine intake and low incidence of heart disease (in spite of the high-fat French diet). “Most researchers agreed that there was something in the wine that offered protection,” reported CBS. That ingredient is the phytochemical resveratrol. It is found in high concentrations in the skin of the grape, making red wine – along with grape juice and a handful of other foods – an excellent source of it.

Just as resveratrol shields the grape, it acts as an antioxidant in the human body. It can protect us from damaging free radicals and thus reduce our risk of certain types of cancer. Resveratrol also has anti-infective and anti-inflammatory properties, as well as the ability to lower and regulate blood sugar levels. These attributes help the body perform at an optimum level and minimize health risks, both of which are beneficial to weight loss.

The real secret ingredient: SIRT1

It is actually resveratrol’s ability to activate a potent gene called SIRT1 that makes it such a powerful weight loss aid. “A very simple explanation is that when you are in a food scarcity situation, SIRT1 is activated so as to help break down your stored fat to use as fuel,” writes Byron J. Richards of Wellness Resources, “as well as to boost up your energy so that you have enough energy to hunt for new food.” Resveratrol triggers the SIRT1 gene by mimicking a famine situation, and thus helps the body burn fat more effectively.

The SIRT1 gene often becomes inactive in the body due to leptin resistance, a condition that is common in the overweight. A consequence of frequent overeating, this leptin resistance causes the body to turn off the SIRT1 gene. “It is easy to predict that high levels of leptin in your blood (obesity-related leptin resistance) turn SIRT1 off as they would be signaling your liver that famine is over,” says Richards. Resveratrol repairs the damage of leptin resistance by turning the SIRT1 gene back on.

Other foods that contain resveratrol

Red wine and grape juice are rich in resveratrol, but there are other sources of the beneficial phytochemical. Grapes themselves are a great source of resveratrol, as are blueberries, cranberries and some nuts, including peanuts.

There has been debate about whether food containing resveratrol provides enough of the phytochemical to benefit the body. Research indicates that a resveratrol supplement is probably the best way to incorporate resveratrol into your diet. That way you’ll get enough of to reap benefits without needing to brave any of the consequences, such as the high triglycerides, increased risk of breast cancer and migraines that can come with red wine.

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