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Recently, I wrote an article on my blog about Cristiano Ronaldo, and his supposed 3,000 crunches or sit-ups per day. Now as we all know (or a quick Google image search will tell us), Cristiano is in great shape. So the tendency is to put 1 and 1 together.

1: Man in great shape with ripped six pack abs + 1: Does 3,000 crunches or sit-ups per day = 2: I should start doing thousands of crunches per day too.

But probably not for the first time in your life, you’ve got the 1+1 sum wrong. (Isn’t it always more complicated than it seems?)

And the reason why? Crunches and sit-ups do not burn belly fat!

You see, Cristiano Ronaldo aside, the main reason why most of us don’t have ripped six pack abs is because we have too much belly fat covering our mid-section. So if we waste our time on exercises that don’t get rid of this flab, we’ll get nowhere fast!

Crunches and sit-ups are good for toning and building your abdominal muscles. But no matter how big our abs are, they will never be visible unless we remove our ugly belly fat.

So as you can see, losing our belly fat is vitally important to getting those 6 pack abs.

Luckily for Cristiano, he is a professional athlete. So he has no trouble getting rid of his belly flab. So if he wants to spend time ‘toning’ his abs then it’s up to him. Even though my personal opinion is that 3,000 crunches per day is highly excessive.

The Problem with Crunches
So why is it that sit-ups are almost completely pointless for ‘real world’ guys and gals like you and me?

After all, traditional exercise advice teaches you to isolate the muscle group you want to work on. And of course sit-ups and crunches isolate your abdominal muscles. So what is the problem?

By isolating one muscle group at a time you are actually being extremely inefficient with your exercise. You will burn far fewer calories during, and crucially far few calories after each workout than you need to significantly reduce your body fat percentage.

Say Goodbye to Sit-ups

But don’t worry, there is a solution to almost every problem in the world, and this is certainly no exception. Get ready to say “goodbye” to your crunches and sit-ups! And while you’re there, you should seriously think about getting rid of all exercises in your routine that isolate specific muscle groups.

If you really want to learn how to lose belly fat and the truth about six pack abs then you will need to start focusing on multi-joint exercises.

By doing so you will be recruiting multiple muscle groups at a time, increasing the ‘work’ in every workout exponentially. And guess what, you’ll go into fat burning over drive.

This increased workload, and the extra stress (the good kind of stress) on your muscle groups will actually cause your body to kick-start a fat burning, hormonal response to your workouts.

Don’t get me wrong; you’ll achieve this hormonal response with any type of workout. But if you’ve been isolating your muscle groups then you will have only experienced a fraction of the fat burning potential you’re about to unleash.

Some excellent examples of multi-joint exercises are: front squats, renegade dumbbell rows, dumbbell step-ups, pull-ups/ chin-ups.

I guess you’re probably feeling a little bit skeptical right now, but that’s OK, it’s human nature. But I want you to do a little test for me. Just replace your sit-ups and crunches with the multi-joint exercises above. Just give it 2 weeks.

I guarantee you’ll see some amazing results. You wont want to stop!

Article Source: EzineArticles.com