After Hundreds of Upper Abs and Lower Abs Crunches ...

Yeah, you guess right. You still have no visible abs after hundreds of upper abs and lower abs crunches.

Ab training has been done to death but it's time to take another look. Why? Because people are still training their abs wrong so all that ab training information must not be doing the right job.

Here are top 3 tips about abdominal training that you should know and follow.

1. There's no such thing as spot reducing.
Endless crunches will not melt away the fat from your midsection. It just doesn't work that way. And despite the "burn" of high rep ab exercises, you barely burn any calories while doing those endless crunches. Your fat burning time is best spent elsewhere on more effective cardio training.

2. The Abs are muscles and should be trained as such.
You don't need high reps and lots of sets to work your abs. This just leads to over training. Now, abs are a more endurance oriented muscle so slightly higher reps may be more effective. However, you should keep the reps at 20 or lower and work on increasing the resistance and variety in your training. Yes, you should be increasing the weights on ab exercises, just like your other exercises. The stronger your abs, the better they will look when the fat is stripped away. Ever see a really thin guy with a flat stomach but no abs? In that instance, the abs haven't been trained and aren't developed enough to stand out even when the fat is stripped away.

3. Don't train the abs more than necessary.
Your abs get a lot of indirect work from other exercises so you really won't need more than a couple of hard sets of weighted crunches to work your abs. Your abs are a factor in exercises such as squats, dead lifts, seated or standing presses, dumbbell pullovers, pulldowns, etc.

Next time you work out, do a few hard sets of standing stiff armed pulldowns on the lat machine and tell me your abs aren't sore the next day. If you want to develop a flat stomach with your abs visible, you need to treat your abs the same as your other muscles.

The number of ab machines constantly coming to market is mind boggling. Especially considering that they aren't needed and won't give you the results that you want unless you begin training your abs like regular muscles rather than like a machine that needs 100 reps to get primed up.