Here’s why skipping rope is more effective than going to the gym for your six-pac

Last Updated on 2016-05-18 , 3:14 pm

Are you doing crazy ab exercises for that sexy 6 pack? If you are, then you’re doing it wrong. In fact, ab exercises are entirely unnecessary and you are just wasting your energy.

If you are a physically active person, if you squat, you lift, you play sports, chances are, you have abs. This is simply because the ab muscles are so vital in all these activities that your abs are already training even without the deliberate high intensity ab exercises to work them up. What’s the problem them? Why don’t you have the six pack?

The answer is simple. You have the six packs, but they’re hidden under a layer of belly fat.

So the problem that you should be focusing on is removing the belly fat, not making your abs bigger. However, this can be really tough, especially for guys, as fats tend to pool around the belly for males.

One misconception about fat burning, is that working your stomach muscles will burn the fats located around them. This is not true at all. The idea to losing the fats, is to achieve what is known as a caloric deficit, which is when your body burns more calories than it attains it. There are two steps. Firstly, burning more calories and secondly, reducing calorie intake.

Now, reducing calorie intake require little explanation on our part; there are countless websites, apps, magazines for that. As for burning calories, sit ups and crunches are terrible options. They are not cardio exercises, and builds muscle instead of burning fats.

What you should be doing, is cardio exercises like running and rope skipping. But since many people hates running, we’ll talk about rope skipping.

In an average 15-minute jumping, you’ll burn about 250 calories, but because of something called EPOC (excess post-exercise oxygen consumption) which happens after sprinting or other intense cardio workout, you will continue to burn calories long after your workout has been completed. So, your actual total calories burned from that jump rope workout is more like 400 calories.

That said, your rope jumping needs to be high intensity. A sample interval training would be 30 seconds of jumping as fast as you can, followed by 10 seconds of rest, then another 30 seconds and so on. Until 15 minutes is up.

We wish you all the best in your quest to get ripped!