How to Bathe Your Cat and Create 6-Packs Abs

Fitness Training for the Over 40 Crowd

wolf@GrayWolfTraining.com

How to Bathe Your Cat and Create 6-Packs Abs

Put both lids of the toilet up and add the required amount of pet shampoo to the water in the bowl.
Pick up the cat and soothe him while you carry him towards the bathroom.
In one smooth movement, put the cat in the toilet and close both lids. You may need to stand on the lid.
The cat will self agitate and make ample suds. Never mind the noises that come from the toilet, the cat is actually enjoying this.
Flush the toilet three or four times. This provides a "power-wash" and "rinse."
Have someone open the door to the outside. Be sure that there are no people between the toilet and the outside door.
Stand behind the toilet as far as you can, and quickly lift both lids.
The cat will rocket out of the toilet, and run outside where he will dry himself off.
Both the commode and the cat will be sparkling clean!

Always here to give you the best of tested advice in difficult times…

Sincerely,
The Dog

Ha ha, but what does this have to do with creating 6-Pack abs you ask?

Pick up just about any fitness magazine and featured on the cover will be an article for the latest greatest ab exercise. They'll have you bending at the waist in more ways than a contortionist scratching fleas - None of which will do much to improve your abs. To understand why this is so, you must understand TWO SIMPLE TRUTHS about abs.

Simple Truth #1 - Abs are skeletal muscles, just like biceps, legs, calves, etc.
Simple Truth #2 - To make a your abs visible, your body fat must be 10-12% or less.

So, keeping Simple Truth #1 in mind, if you want bigger abs, you must do an exercise that will make your ab muscles bigger. Did I hear you say, "well, duhh!" This seems so obvious that it's mind boggling that so few people follow this simple principle when trying to improve their abs. Like all skeletal muscles, if you want to make your ab muscles bigger, you must do an ab exercise that you can only do at most 12 repetitions of before the muscle tires out. This is a fundamental rule of bodybuilding. If you can do more than 12 repetitions, then the exercise will do very little to make the muscle bigger. If you did sets of 50 reps of bicep curls, would you expect your biceps to get bigger? No. The same principle applies to your abs. Most gym goers understand this principle, yet for some reason when working their abs, they completely ignore it.

So to make your ab muscles bigger, you must do an exercise that is too taxing for you to do more than 12 repetitions of.

The same applies to all your other skeletal muscles.

Now let's look at Simple Truth #2. To make your abs visible, your body fat must be 10-12% or less.

It takes 20,000 crunches to burn a pound of fat.

How does doing hundreds of ab crunches, etc. help lower your body fat? It doesn't. Well at least not much. The abs are a relatively small muscle group, which means you burn very few calories when exercising them. In fact, it takes around 20,000 crunches to burn a pound of fat. For an exercise to help you reduce your body fat, the exercise must burn as many calories as possible. That means the exercise should engage the large muscle groups, such as the legs (or better yet, your whole body). Working your abs will do very little to reduce your body fat, and consequently will do very little to make your abs more visible. Again, "well, duh," yet people completely ignore this simple fact when trying to improve their abs.

So to sum up:

Doing an exercise that you can do more than 12 repetitions of will do little to make your muscles larger and more defined.
Exercising a small muscle group, such as the abs, will do little to burn calories, and therefore, will do little to reduce your body fat or make your abs more visible.

So back to our TWO SIMPLE TRUTHS

Simple Truth #1 - Abs are skeletal muscles, just like biceps, legs, calves, etc.
Simple Truth #2 - To make your abs visible, your body fat must be 10-12% or less.

Keeping theses two truths in mind, you can see that most ab routines touted in popular magazine articles will do little to improve the appearance of your abs. You must lower your body fat and that requires diet and doing exercises that burn a lot of calories. Since crunches, etc. work your abs, which are a relatively small muscle group, working them burns very few calories. You must also do exercises that will make your ab muscles larger. Again, if you can do more than 12 crunches, etc., then they will do nothing to make your abs larger.

Which brings us around to what does bathing your cat have to do with creating 6-Pack Abs? Not much, which is about the same as most articles about creating great abs.

So why do so many people promote endless ab exercises to create 6-pack abs? Because it's great marketing. It's easy to sell a program of 10-minute ab workouts. It's hard to sell a program involving real cardio and proper nutrition.

More pictures of my abs. These were taken when I was 54 years old.

Here's me at 56 - Less lean, but more muscular abs.

As with any nutrition or exercise program, always review them with your doctor to ensure that they don't interact with or are contraindicated by any medications or medical issues you may have. If you haven't trained for a while, start out slow and go easy. If you are pregnant, have diabetes, blood sugar problems, or any heart issues, you shouldn't do this program as it is very strenuous.