A flat belly takes a lot of effort for most people these days, so it’s important to know how to get a flat belly.
Watching TV ads can make you think the only method is a lot of pure ab exercises. I am going to show you how compound exercises are in fact, the best route to a flat belly.
In fact, mixing intermittent fasting and compound exercises will get you ripped in no time flat.
It does seem counterproductive to use squats, pull-ups, deadlifts, and other compound exercises for a better-looking stomach.
However, if you want a toned, tight, and flat belly — these are the exercises for the job.
Let’s have a look at 4 important reasons compound exercises do the best job of flattening your belly.
1. Burn More Calories
The first key to a flat belly is losing weight. Well, to be more specific, you have to get rid of the fat, and spot reducing fat is just a dream.
When you are working several muscle groups at the same time, you have no choice but to burn more calories.
Doing activities like squats, lat pulldowns, dips, and the like work several different muscle groups at the same time. That’s why their called compound, right?
You can’t burn as many calories with ab exercises as you can with deadlifts simply because your body recruits the larger muscle groups in your back and legs with compound workouts.
That means that overall, you’re doing more work, burning more calories, and creating more fat loss with compound exercises. This leads to a flatter belly — And not just in the morning, either.
2. Builds Lean Muscle
Doing more compound exercises helps your body in retaining and building lean muscle mass all over your body.
Because you usually train much harder doing compound workouts, you will force your body to build more muscle to cope with the increased demands.
This is why you never need to bother with weighing yourself during the first month or so when you’re starting out on a weight loss diet. (Well, that is if you include exercise as part of the journey, which is indeed essential to the best results.)
Starting any new physical activity program will almost always cause your body to gain muscle and lose fat as it is trying to adapt and cope with the new routine.
Regular workouts replace stomach fat with lean muscle.
That means that on the scale any muscle gain offsets the fat loss. As this is happening the numbers won’t show much difference, misleading you into thinking you aren’t losing any weight.
In reality, you will be making plenty of progress and should stay encouraged.
Losing weight is never enough!
You need to look your best after it’s gone. You always need to build lean muscle so that your appearance is more chiseled and toned as the fat disappears.
3. Boost Your Metabolism
Here’s the thing, the more muscle mass you can gain, the higher your resting metabolic rate is going to gain.
Because muscle is always more calorically expensive than fat, the more muscle on your body, the more calories you burn at any given time.
More Muscle = More Metabolism = Better Fat Burn = Flatter Stomach
That’s a very important reason to exercise and replace fat with muscle when you are dieting.
The additional muscle makes it much easier to keep the fat off once you’ve lost it.
When people lose weight without any exercise, you will often notice how the moment their diet slips — the weight comes back multiplied and with a vengeance.
From that alone, you can see how ab exercises alone simply aren’t as good as compound workouts.
The compound workouts are for increasing muscle in more places in your body which in the end makes dieting much easier and faster. With more muscle, you will have more leeway with your diet.
4. Increased Strength
Without a doubt, ab workouts have their place and are important for focusing mainly on your midsection.
But the fact is, you need to only dedicate about 5 – 6 minutes daily to training your abs. Just hit your ab sessions quick and hard for a few minutes, and you’re good to go.
But, it’s not enough to only focus on or train your abs without thinking of the rest of your body.
Really, picture how you would look being grossly overweight with 6-pak abs?
That’s why it’s important to remember that while you want a flat belly, you must strengthen your thighs, shoulders, back, etc. to get the look and health you really want.
Compound Exercises Now Recruiting Abs
Compound exercises such as:
- Dumbbell lunges
- Barbell squats
- Pull-ups Burpees
- Deadlifts Shoulder presses
- etc
will work several different muscles at the same time. And most of these compound workouts recruit your ab muscles as stabilizers.
Increasing overall strength is vital to increasing muscle mass that burns calories to naturally flatten your belly.
But that’s not all:
Strength training will help combat fatigue, weakness, and aid in building and preserving bone density.
Summary
When you use compound exercises to get a flat midsection, you are working abs without even knowing it.
As a result, your body gets stronger overall and you make much more progress in the same amount of time because your workouts are more productive.
By now you should realize how compound exercises make a better option for getting a flat belly.
Focus most of your training on them and you’ll be amazed at how much faster you achieve the toned body of your dreams.