Tips For Losing Stomach Fat & Getting Lean Abs

The Top Tips You Need to Know for Losing Stomach Fat & Getting Lean Abs
How to Get Flat 6-Pack Abs without Useless Crunches or Situps - Nutrition & Workout Secrets for a Lean Body and Flat Abs

Interview with Mike Geary, Certified Personal Trainer, Certified Nutrition Specialist
This is a recent interview that was done with me.  Pay close attention and you'll find TONS of useful info that will help you get lean sexy abs much faster and stop struggling with excess body fat.  Enjoy!

SN:  It's great to sit down and speak with you, Mike. To start off, how about telling our readers a little bit about yourself and your fitness background.
MG:   I've actually been involved in the fitness industry for about a decade now, as a Certified Nutrition Specialist and a Certified Personal Trainer. I'm also the founder of TruthAboutAbs.com and author of the #1 best selling abdominals ebook in the world currently, The Truth about Six Pack Abs, with over 250,000 readers in over 155 countries.
I started developing the Truth about Abs program about 5 years ago based on how much I saw most people struggle with this topic and the amount of confusion and scams / gimmicks that were out there regarding abs and belly fat. I just saw that it was time somebody laid out the TRUTH about what REALLY works to get ripped six pack abs.

SN:  Let's get right down to it. Everyone wants a flat set of 6-pack abs, yet very few people ever achieve that goal. Why do you think there's so much confusion on the subject? Is it really all that complicated of a process?
MG:  You know, it's really NOT that complicated... However, with that said, to get your body fat % low enough to really see a nice set of abs, it does take a decent amount of discipline with your food intake as well as a whole new level of intensity with your workouts than what most people are used to. The thing is, most of my clients always comment that the style of eating that I recommend is actually fun, and they feel more energy due to the more natural unprocessed healthy foods they're eating and more balanced blood sugar and hormone levels in their body.
The problem is that there's so much conflicting advice out there these days, it leads the average joe or jane to over-complicate things and end up totally confused about what's the best way to train and eat for six pack abs.

SN:  You've said before that abdominal exercises such as crunches and situps are extremely ineffective when it comes to achieving a flat stomach, and that they can actually make your stomach look WORSE. Can you elaborate on that?
MG:  Sure... First of all, let me make clear that I'm not saying that you shouldn't do any abs-specific exercises. Rather, my point of contention is that most people spend WAY too much time focusing all of their efforts on abs-specific exercises, instead of focusing their efforts on more effective full body exercises that stimulate a much greater fat-burning and muscle building hormonal response, burn more calories, stimulate the metabolism to a higher extent, and also indirectly work the abs to a decent degree anyway.
Let me give an example of how many people typically waste too much time on abs-specific exercises...
A lot of times I see the average joe or jane spending about 15-30 minutes of their total workout just doing tons of pointless repetitions of crunches, situps, leg raises, or some other "abs pumping" exercise. Many times this comes out to almost HALF of their entire time working out.
My point here is that this type of excessive abs training is really a waste of time training a relatively small muscle group such as the abs, when that time could have been better spent on full body exercises such as squats, deadlifts, clean & presses, lunges, upper body presses and pulls, dumbbell swings, snatches, etc, etc.  Compared to spending that time doing abs exercises, all of the above types of exercises will give you magnitudes more results in terms of hormonal response, metabolism increase, calorie burning, etc... all while indirectly working the abs to an extent anyway.
After focusing the majority of your workout efforts on those types of more effective full body exercises, then it's ok to spend about 5-7 minutes directly training the abs with abs-specific exercises... but the point I'd like to make is that abs training should only be a small portion of your training program as a whole, and not the majority of it.
Also, back to the topic of crunches and situps in particular... Once you've got a decent amount of abdominal training under your belt, crunches tend to be one of the least effective ab strengthening exercises since they are actually a fairly low-resistance exercise. An example of a higher resistance abs exercise would be a hanging leg raise with a proper pelvic curl-up (different than what you see most people doing in the gyms, where they only raise their knees up).