Ab Workout Exercises for a Six Pack

Men's and Women's Six Pack Workout, Best Ab Exercises, Stomach and Abdominal Routines

Follow ab workouts with other training for the best results.

After an intense abs workout, those muscles, and the rest of your body, should be ready to move on to different training. Following grueling stomach exercises with cardio is a terrific match. While the best ab exercises can develop those muscles, shredding becomes visible when paired with a high-powered, fat burning cardio workout. In our six pack ab workouts, we suggest tackling your stomach muscles two times to a maximum of four times a week, leaving lots of time for their recovery, while allotting plenty of time to burn fat, and sculpt and tone other parts of your body.

Turns out, those old ab workout exercises called crunches aren't the best way to six pack abs, either. For effective stomach workouts, contrary to popular exercise myths, straight-up crunches leave much to be desired. Unlike the best ab exercises, crunches focus solely on one move, and overlook the transversus abdominis, the deepest ab muscle. A better shredding six pack workout gets the entire body in on the act, and works the full spectrum of abdominal muscles.

Your ab workout routine should also include exercises that work the obliques, which are the sides of the abdomen. Stomach workouts worth their weight in Olympic gold should be strengthening all of these muscles, along with the rectus abdominis (those six pack muscles targeted by crunches). The best ab exercises are then comprehensive, not narrowly focused. A six pack workout should not only forge eye-candy, it should tone those muscles for better support for your spine, torso, and abdominal organs, and it should even improve posture.

So your abs workout has produced a set of great, can't-wait-to-show-'em-off-at-the-beach abs: Now what? Stomach workouts should have you looking beyond that washboard stomach. The very best ab exercise programs make you look inside, too. Any six pack workout would be wise to also keep step with Tony Horton's rumination that, "Fitness isn't only physical. It's not about dress sizes or what the numbers on a scale say. It's about a mental and emotional shift that occurs through physical activity." (The Dr. Oz Show) In other words, your abdominal workout routine should be building a path toward an entire, better you, inside and out.