On twitter there are always fitness trends among the fitties. One of the trends is to dedicate each month to achieving certain goals, last month it was squat Sept this month focus goes to getting ripped abs during #OctoAbs. I love how all the fitness anons & fitness accounts (Fitblrs) encourage and motivate each other on twitter and on Tumblr. If ever you find it hard to stick to your goals and you lack the inspiration to push on, I advise you to open a twitter account dedicated to improving your fitness, through exercise and healthy eating, or joining the fit fam on Tumblr where there is never a shortage of workout inspiration (through visual aids made from a combination of inspiring images and motivational quotes).

It is amazing the effect of others when it comes to making us get off the coach and start working out. Also when you are on these sites you get to meet awesome individuals whom you will form friendships with, individuals whose stories and transformation will give you strength when you need it, individuals who will help you get up when you fail because failure is not permanent, its only when you don’t get up and do something about it when it becomes permanent.

Abs Workout Breakdown for #Octoabs

For #OctoAbs the aim is to be ripped and have a flat belly by the end of the month, so what you should do is pick out a number of abs exercises and a form of cardio. Let’s say you choose 4 abs workout for example sit ups (upper abs), planks(whole abs region), leg raises(lower abs) and Russian (cherry pickers) twists for obliques, then maybe you choose cycling or jump rope as your cardio. At the beginning of the month you could start out small with like doing 15 reps of each abs exercise one after the other without a break.  In a week you could have 4 abs workout days, 2 cardio days between abs workout days and 1 rest day, working abs can form part of your normal gym routine it does not interfere with your normal weight lifting. Working out abs can be done after your workouts.

To continue explaining the progressive abs routine, since you are working abs out 4 times a week for #OctoAbs on the first abs workout day you could do 15 reps for each example exercise I mentioned above or any 4 abs exercise of your liking that target all abs regions. The first abs day might not seem challenging but each abs day you should increase the amount of reps you do by about 10 to 15 reps so that by the end of #OctoAbs you are doing a serious number of challenging reps of each exercise one after the other.

Burn Stomach fat and reveal abs

As for the cardio, the aim is to progressively improve there as well. If you are choosing something like jump rope, you should plan to increase the amount of time you spend doing jump rope over the month for example starting out with doing 3 to 5 mins the increasing the time every cardio session you have. Same with cycling, you should aim to increase you distance while decreasing the amount of time it takes you for example if you do 5Km in 10 minutes then you should aim for doing 6 km in 10 minutes or something like that, but the point is to always improve every week no matter how small the improvement. The point is to have a high intensity of training.

You will find that challenging yourself in this way will result in you being shredded and having those ripped 8 pack abs by the end of #OctoAbs.

Getting abs is not as simple as just decreasing carbs but that will take you one step closer to getting the kind of bodyfat level that you need. My previous post talked about diet and briefly talked about why you should cut certain foods out of your diet, in this post I want to tell you why you should decrease carbs.

I am assuming that you are the average person with the average metabolic rate, people with fast metabolism have an easier time burning calories and tend to get away with a lot of eating without gaining much fat, but they still got to work for their abs but not as hard as most people. I will say that we are all different and respond in different ways to different diets so you have to play around with your own diet to see what work and what does not.

Let me start with some historic information, people back in ancient times survived by eating meat mostly and fruits and veggies, the meat provided all the protein they needed, it also provided the fat that they needed (yes we actually need fat, a diet without fat is in fact unhealthy), the fruits and the veggies provided proteins, fiber and other important nutrients. To put things simply olden day people were not obese, but were lean, strong and healthy, nowadays obesity is an increasing issue with families increasingly dependent on junk food and canned processed foods which are not good for them.

The problem we have now is that we consume too many calories but I am only going to talk of carbohydrate in this post. So to rephrase my previous statement, we consume too many carbohydrates, some of the foods (carbs we eat) are empty calories with little to no benefit to your health and nutrition, the best thing you could do to lose weight is to stop eating bread products, rolls, buns...the list continues but I am sure you get the point. It is even worse if you are woman because your metabolic rate is lower than male metabolic rate which makes it easier for you to gain fat (the world is not fair I know).

Carbs are used by the body as an energy source, so that you are able to do your daily activities. If you have a job that involves a lot of sitting you do not need to consume many carbs, that works against you because you do not use the carbs you consume instead your body converts and store the carbs as fat. The best thing to do is to eat carbs during your most active times of the day so that they are used and not stored as fat. It is best to have the bulk of your carbs earlier on in the day so that by the end of the day you have used up those calories, infact you need to eat most of your carbs at breakfast when you body need the energy plus it will give you body the longest possible time to use them.

Since this is a post about getting ripped abs I am assuming you workout because you can’t possibly think you can get ripped abs without exercising. It is best to consume carbs before and after a workout as they will most likely be used up because you use up a lot of energy when you are working out and the period shortly after that. Also avoid eating carbohydrates late at night, you will not use the calories you take in and they will be store as fat. When it comes to getting ripped abs fat is the enemy, and decreasing carbs and being mindful of when you have them will help you lean out and stay lean.