Ever notice how most people include ab exercises in their routines and yet somehow or other, they can never see their six pack of abs? Since you are here, I must assume you have been doing your ab exercises, and you are not seeing the results you are looking for. You are one of those people. This may be suprising to you, but ab muscles are some of the easiest muscles to build. The problem is not building the abs, the problem is being able to see your six pack.

Here is the truth about why you cannot see your abs.

Those of you who work out regularly likely own the sought after six pack. Yes, you do. The trouble is that your belly fat is hiding them. Abs are not visible if your body fat is over 12%. The more fat you burn, the more visible your abs will be. You can own those chiseled washboard abs by dropping your body fat to 10% or less. If you have fat on your belly, forget about ab exercises. Concentrate you efforts to burn off the excess fat.

There are a few rare people who cannot see their abs although they have low body fat. There is a simple explanation. They concentrate on the wrong exercises and work out using bad form. For example, the most common abs exercises are sit ups and leg raises. Almost everyone does these two exercises, not knowing that they really will not do much for their abs, unless they are performed correctly. They think they are performing them correctly, but are sabotaging their efforts.

If you do not believe me that you likely do these exercises wrong, try this. When you do a sit up or leg raise, put your palms on your hip flexors, the area which connects your abdomen to your thigh. Tell me what you feel. Do you understand now? The hip flexors are doing most of the work. How can you develop your abs effectively, when you are primarily working on your hip flexors? You cannot work the abs effectively unless you are working on your abs. You must concentrate you efforts to keep the hip flexors from doing the work.

Leg raises are probably out now, until you are stronger. They are a very, very hard exercise to do properly. So you say, I will substitute with crunches. Well, here is another surprise. The majority of people perform crunches incorrect as well. Think for a moment. Why is the exercise called the crunch? It is because you must squeeze your abs so that you crunch them. To squeeze your abs hard, you must curl up like a prawn and breathe out all the air in your lungs, when at the top position, and then squeeze your muscles so hard that you feel a burn on every single crunch. It takes a few seconds to crunch out all the air before you can lower to the starting position, if you are doing it properly.

You cannot do crunches effectively if you are just going up and down rhythmically. If you have been doing hundreds of crunches everyday with minimal results, you know why. You are taking the abs out of the movement, and transferring the load to the hip flexors. It is almost impossible for the average guy to do tens of proper crunches. Hundreds of them will not be done properly. If you are able to do that many, your hip flexors are really strong, not your abs. The squeezing principle applies to other abs exercises as well. You must feel the exercise in the abs, not anywhere else.

Now that you know why your abs are not visible, get on with burning the fat. If you have been using improper technique on your ab exercises, fix it and perform your workout with correct form. If you do these deceivingly simple things, you will see your six pack abs in no time.