by Steve Halvorson

Created on: December 12, 2009

Getting a six-pack and maintaining it is actually relatively easy, yet the average person does not necessarily know how to go about getting one.  I will say right off the bat that doing sit-ups will not get you a six-pack.  One common misconception is that if you do sit-ups, then you are going to burn the fat around your waist.

The reality is that you cannot burn fat from target areas on your body.  Your body distributes fat evenly across the body based on your genetic predisposition for fat distribution.  Women are predisposed to store fat on the butt, hips, and the back of the arms.  Men are predisposed to store fat around the waist.  The amount of fat you have on a specific area of your body has nothing to do with how much you exercise and train that particular part of your body.  Body fat distributes across the body evenly.

Another misconception is that you have to do sit-ups to actually get abs when the reality is that you already have abs.  The are simply just covered with fat.  If you didn't already have abs, your body would collapse on itself because there would be nothing supporting your midsection.

The only effective way to get a six-pack is to lower your overall body fat percentage.  In order to do this, you have to burn more calories than you consume.  It may help to do some heavy abdominal exercises to increase the overall size and shape of your abs as well.  I will go into detail about that at the end of the article.  The main priority is lowering your overall body fat percentage.

When talking about lowering your overall bodyfat percentage, there are two sides to the equation.  On one side, we want to control how many calories we consume, and on the other side, we want to burn as many calories as we can.

Controlling how many calories are consumed is fairly easy.  You simply have to figure out how much you should eat in a day and then try to stay within a reasonable range of that value.  If you want to figure out how many calories you should eat in a day, then find a calorie calculator.  Here are 3 solid websites that all have calorie calculators on them: bodybuilding.com, dietitian.com, and ast-ss.com.

As far as burning as many calories as possible, there are a lot of factors that have an effect on that aspect.  The amount of calories you burn in a day is dependant on 4 factors: exercise, nutrition, lean muscle mass, and

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