too many sit ups is useless?

H

halfling

0
the two most important part of my body that i look at are my ass and my abs. but reading up on ab workouts, i hear alot of "tons and tons are not neccesarily effective". ie they say thing like do 20~50, and at max 100. no way i can get any burn in that. in fact i do 1000 2~3 times a week. but most sites tell me that pointless. what am i doing wrong? if its useless i DEFINITELY want t stop and do somthign else. 1000 takes about 30 mins, a big chunk of time. what should i do? i can see a six pack, but theyr not super visible, or uber solid. theyr not an old mans keg but they could be better.

ps im trying to lose about 10 lbs now. maybe that'll help?
 
Doing a thousand situps isn't giving you the results you want, and there's a reason for that. Your body fat % is too high. I don't know your sex/age group, but the most common place for fat to accumulate for anyone is the stomach - precisely where you want to show off those abs.

The trouble is, no matter how buff your abs are, no one is going to see them if there's a layer of fat over them. If you want those abs, you'll have to change your diet and get your body fat under 10%.
 
What Judecca says is true, except that if your abs are "big" enough from doing heavy resistance on them, they can be visible with much higher BF that you think. I can still see mine when my bf is around 20 (not as well, mind you). I am currently about 12-14% and they are quite visible. That is purely a genetic thing though I think, because I have known people who had 6% BF who still had love handles and no visible abs.
 
well its probably the fat then. i have around 13%, dono how many % itll drop with 10 lbs, but my brother's abs are very visible, and he NEVER works them (although he plays alot of soccer, maybe 5 practices a week). he has something like 8, 9% bf.

ps, so how many situps/ab workouts SHOULD i do? whats your recommended ab workout?
 
find a way of adding some resistance to your ab workouts. holding a plate on your chest is the most common way. russian twists with a dumbell is another way.
 
try performing the exercise slower so that it's more controlled, make sure your abs are pulled in on both the way up and way down or you could add pulses at the top of the movement
 
JP: I didn't know that BF% could be that high and abs would still be visible. This is one of these cases where, y'know, I'm kinda glad I'm wrong :D

But I mean, like, if you have a huge beer gut, you're never going to see your abs, even if you're Ronnie Coleman (well, maybe Ronnie Coleman, but certainly not anyone else).
 
Yeah I stopped getting results when I was doing too many sit ups. I do them now holding a plate weight behind my head or doing them on a decline bench. Much more challenging that way.

Sarah
 
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