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Introduction

There’s a saying about how everyone has abs. It is TRUE. We are all born with abs regardless of our body shape. Fat people who have bulging tummies indeed have their abs secretly lying right beneath those fats.

Are you fat, with tummy or love handles (fats on waist)? Or are you skinny, with visible bony figure or maybe flabby tummy?

Whichever body figure you are donning now, are you sick and tired of it? You might have tried plenty of ways from food diet to exercises but nothing seems to work very well for you? All you want is just to look great, feel good and be confident. Am I right?

Here’s the good news for you! You already have a wonderful set of killer washboard abs! It might just be hidden underneath your fats or is still underdeveloped. The one and simple way is to get rid of the flab above by shedding off your fats, and tadah! It’s really as simple as that!

This article will teach you the extremely easy abs workout that will help you build the to-die-for sexy washboard abs!

Cardiovascular Exercise

Washboard abs, getting lean and losing weight are all tied into a consistent cardiovascular workout program.

Cardiovascular workout is an endurance exercise that strengthens the circulatory system by increasing your metabolic rate. By doing it over long stretches of time, it makes your heart beat faster and pump more blood through your system, bringing nutrients and oxygen to every cell.

Cardio workout can be simply explained as physical exercise of low to high intensity that depends on the aerobic energy-generating process of the exercise you do. It’s any activity that gets your heart rate raised to 50 - 75% of your maximum heart rate. Calculate your maximum with the formula 220 minus your age. For example, if you’re 25 years old, 220 - 25 = 195.

Cardio workout burns calories in your body. Most people do cardio training to lose weight, gain body mass, train stamina, etc.

You should do 30-45 minutes of activities like walking, running, biking or swimming daily 4-5 times per week. It takes about four weeks before you start to see the physical benefits of your diet and exercise program. You should notice immediate results in your energy level, overall mental alertness when exercising daily. Start off slowly if you are a beginner in cardiovascular exercises. A good way to get started is to walk or run with the following six weeks program:

Week #1 - Walk/run - 1 mile a day for 5 days a week
Week #2 - Walk/run - 2 miles a day for 5 days a week
Week #3 - Non-impact week - bike or swim for 20-30 minutes a day
Week #4 - Walk/run - 2 miles a day for 5 days a week
Week #5 - Walk/run - 3 miles a day for 4-5 days a week
Week #6 - Walk/run - 4 miles a day for 4-5 days a week

Note: week #3 is non-impact due to the possible number of strains/injuries that occur to legs (knees, shins, feet, hips) during the third week of beginning a walking or running program.

When you have shed off the layer of fats on the surface, it is time for the real game: Sculpturing The Dream Abs

Targeting The Regions

Our abdominal muscles consist of 3 major muscle groups and 4 distinct areas: the upper abs, lower abs, obliques and transverse abs.

Your body adapts to your current abdominal workout. It is important to change your ab workouts every few weeks to continue developing your core strength and stability.
Any complete ab workout works all of these abdominal muscle groups. The following basic ab workouts consist of multiple exercises that target distinct areas of your abdomen, while at the same time works multiple muscle groups as well.

EXERCISE 1:

SIT-UPS

Primary Target: Upper Abs

Secondary Target: Lower Abs and Obliques

Lie flat on your back on the floor with your knees bent and your legs secured under something heavy that could hold your body weight. Place your hands behind your head.

Flexing your abdominals, raise your torso until you are in nearly a sitting position.

Retaining tension on the abs, lower your torso to the beginning position. (Note: Maintain full control throughout the movement. Avoid the temptation to rock back and forth).

EXERCISE 2:

LEG RAISES

PRIMARY TARGET: Lower Abs

SECONDARY TARGET: Upper Abs and Obliques

Lie flat on your back on the floor with your legs straight in front of you. Place your hands at your sides by the floor for support. Flexing your lower abdominals, raise your legs until they are perpendicular to the floor.

Retaining tension on the abs, lower your legs to the beginning position. (Note: Maintain full control throughout the movement. Avoid the temptation to let your legs drop on the negative portion of the movement).

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Building Incredible Functional Strength and Ultimate Health With Kettlebells

Hey, have you heard about kettlebell training?

Likely you’ve seen them cropping up at your local gym and possibly you’ll have seen a few YouTube videos on the subject. After all, kettlebells have very quickly become the latest massive trend for building functional strength and have grown massively in popularity over recent years.

What you might not realise though is just how fantastic kettlebells are for building functional strength, burning calories and greatly improving all-round health. Moreover, you might not have realised just what kettlebells represent. Specifically, kettlebells represent a move to an entirely new type of training and an entirely new philosophy surrounding it.

To be frank, right now your fitness routine is probably woefully insufficient. If you followed conventional fitness and training wisdom and combined that with a conventional lifestyle, then you may be doing untold damage to not only your body but also your brain. That is not to say that you have been misled, simply that we are discovering new information all the time and that this is constantly shifting paradigms with regards to the best forms of training.

This guide will explain everything in detail and introduce the solution: the kettlebell.

Why Your Current Training and Fitness Routine is Not Enough

Consider for a moment the circumstances that led to our evolution and to our current state of being. Put simply, humans have thrived because we are able to adapt very well to our environment. To that end, we have a nervous system and musculature that is inherently plastic and able to change, warp and adapt as the situation demands. We grow new neuronal connections, we develop specific muscles and others atrophy all at the same time.

And our brains and bodies love to adapt in these ways. When we learn new movements and when we challenge our bodies in new ways, it triggers the release of reward chemicals – endorphins and dopamine – which help to reinforce and cement the specific sequence of movements and thoughts that led to that effective movement. This triggers the formation of new connections and that in turn is what keeps the brain youthful, adaptive and learning.

In turn, this makes it easier for us to learn other new things and keeps our brain dynamic and growing. This has been shown to be highly protective against age-related cognitive decline and more serious cases of dementia and Alzheimer’s. In short, if you don’t use it, you lose it.

Meanwhile, complex and challenging movement is what allows us to train all of our supporting muscles, our proprioception, our balance and more. It’s what maintains our flexibility and it’s what gives us functional strength that can actually translate into useful power when we’re working and playing.

But this is not what most of us get from our current routines.

Instead, most of us will spend a good 8-10 hours of every day working in an office. When we’re not working in the office, we’re commuting to and from work.

All this time we are sitting. In the dark. While highly stressed.

When we’re not commuting in and out of work, we’re probably sitting at home in front of the TV.

Sitting is incredibly bad for your health. For starters, it takes years off of your life due to the considerable lack of activity which allows your heart atrophy.

Meanwhile, it causes serious changes to your musculature. Your hip flexors – the muscles that you use to curl your legs behind you – will become stretched and weakened. Meanwhile, your hip extensors – the muscles in your legs that you use for kicking – will become tightened and shortened as your knees are constantly as high as your waist. This creates an imbalance that results in more pressure being placed on one side of your pelvis than the other. This is what leads to an ‘anterior pelvic tilt’ where the pelvis leans forward forcing your buttocks outward and actually making you physically shorter! Of course this isn’t terribly good for your pelvis or your back either and can lead to pain and discomfort.

At the same time, being at the computer all day means that your neck is constantly craned upward, while your arms are stretched forward. This causes a similar tightness and shortness in the pectoral muscles while weakening and stretching your lats and traps. The result is that you end up with a hunch-back posture which once again isn’t particularly attractive or functional.

Again, it’s very simple really: you spend all day in a single position which causes your body to adapt to that position. Some muscles become tense and stiff while others weaken and atrophy. The complete lack of variety in your movement means you get practically frozen in that position and this isn’t even a movement that we would have naturally used in the wild!

So we go to the gym to fix all this. But if you’re like most people, your version of fixing this will involve lifting weights through a very static range of motion using ‘single joint’ movements. These include the likes of bicep curls, which challenge you to curl a weight while bending only your elbow and bench press which further strengthens your pecs.

These exercises do not train the muscles in any functional manner because it isolates them. In the real world, we would only ever train our muscles in unison – working together as one tool and incorporating lots of smaller supporting muscles to help us balance and to give us more support as we go through various motions.

The worst part of it is that most people only train a select few muscles this way – specifically those that are on the front of their bodies. These are called the ‘mirror muscles’ because they’re the ones that look the best in the mirror. But we often don’t spend nearly as much time on our traps, our lats, our erector spinae or our transverse abdominis. The same goes for obliques, for forearms or for all the tiny muscles in between that do things like moving our toes.

This actually makes us even more maladapted. We’ve spent all day sitting down hunched over and then we train the muscles at the front of our bodies with heavy weights. The result is that we’re likely to cause a serious injury.

Meanwhile, the lack of variety in our movements and in our activities allows our brain to become lazy. After the age of 30, most of us stop learning much new at all and as such, we lose motivation, interest and fluid intelligence. We become quite literally ‘set in our ways’ and moving, thinking and growing become very difficult as a result.

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Introduction

Leadership is a skill that everyone should develop and cultivate. Being a leader does not necessarily have to mean being a manager or a politician – it could also mean being a thought leader, or even just being a great parent. The ability to inspire, command and guide others is something that is incredibly valuable and that can help you to accomplish more and even raises your confidence and self-worth.

In this guide, we’re going to examine what it takes to be a leader by looking at some of the most important traits that history’s greatest exhibit. Every leader is different and part of your journey to becoming one is going to be discovering your own ‘leadership style’. With that said though, there are still definitely some common traits that you can develop and some lessons we can learn from influential figures from history. And what you’ll find is that in some ways, the most important aspects of being a great leader are not what you would expect.

I hope this guide will change the way you approach leadership and thereby help you to drastically improve your own results.

1. A Great Leader Does Not Need to be Liked Should a great leader be feared or liked?

The answer is that it doesn’t really matter. What’s most important is that you focus less on trying to be everyone’s friend and more on getting results.

Ultimately, a leader is someone who is trying to accomplish a goal by leverage the power of their team. If your goal is to increase turnover, then you are a good leader if you increase turnover. It doesn’t matter if you are liked along the way.

And sometimes you will have to make hard decisions or break bad news. You need to be willing to do that and not to concerned with how it makes you ‘look’. For example, if your superiors tell you that you and your team are going to need to work late, then you need to pass on that information and not make excuses. The temptation here is to complain along with your staff, to whine about how unfair it is and to make rude comments about the capabilities of your higher-ups.

All this does is to make you look unprofessional, to damage the enthusiasm of your team and to make everyone question the rules they’re being asked to follow.
This is one of the biggest problems with politics too. In order to get re-elected, a leader needs to make positive change in a short space of time so that the electorate can see the results.

The problem is that some projects only yield results over a long period of time and might even hurt the economy in the short term. Making those decisions would be political suicide and so our country is only ever putting out fires, never growing! This is something that a few famous leaders have managed to break away from. Arnold Schwarzenegger most recently discussed this and the value of being willing to make hard decisions.

You don’t have to be unpleasant, but be willing to let your reputation take the hit when it needs to!

2. A Great Leader Takes Responsibility

The reason you need to care less about how others see you, is that this then allows you to take responsibility. You might be passing on orders but for all intents and purposes those are still your orders. Own them and don’t apologize.

Likewise, when things go wrong because your team was working too slowly, you need to take the flack with your superiors and take responsibility. You were leading them, so if they didn’t get the work done, that’s your fault. Throwing your colleagues under the bus will again only make you seem weak and like someone who makes excuses!

What’s more important, is that by taking responsibility for targets not being met and mistakes being made, you are creating a safe ‘buffer’ for those beneath you. They know that they can make decisions and do what they think needs to be done and not worry about the possible repercussions. You’re probably getting paid more than them, so it’s your job to occasionally get shouted at!

This extends even further to taking responsibility for your own actions and decisions. Leaders make decisions quickly and with confidence and that’s not because they always have the answers, but because they’re willing to take the flack if their decisions prove to be wrong.

The worst thing you can do as a leader is to force your team to make hard decisions. Looking to politics for an example again, we can consider the recent decision of David Cameron (England’s ex-prime minister) to vote on whether or not the country should leave the EU.

This was a decision that most analysts agree the country was ill-equipped to make. In this case, politicians were letting the general public do their jobs for them and the consequences may prove to be devastating. Meanwhile, leader of the opposition at the time (Jeremy Corbyn) was famously non-committal in his views on the subject, losing much of his party to lose faith in him. This is in stark contrast with Nicola Sturgeon – who most would agree is a much stronger leader – who has made her views on Scotland leaving the UK very clear.

3. A Great Leader Looks After Their Team

This is one way that a great leader will look after their team but you should also be doing this in every other way possible too.

As a leader, you are responsible for the health and happiness for those that you are in charge of. As long as they’re in your care, they’re your responsibility. That means that you need to protect them from unfair commands that come from up high and it means that you need to make sure they are comfortable, safe and well looked-after as they work.

A fun example of a leader who embodies this notion is ‘Agent Gibbs’ from NCIS. Gibbs viciously protects his team and will go to great lengths to get them out of trouble – not only with the bad guys but also with the organization itself. As a result, he takes on a patriarchal role and his team love him for it. Sure, he’s a fictional character, but this works in real life too! Your team is your most valuable resource, look after them.