It’s hard to have a great looking body. It takes a lot of time, focus and sacrifice. People who have great bodies are revered for it because they have worked hard to achieve it. If you want six pack abs, it is going to take you a while to drop the body fat and build the size of the muscles; you are looking at anywhere from 6 to 18 months for someone who is in reasonable shape. It is going to be a lot longer if you are out of shape and dislike exercise. The reality is that only about 5-10% of the population will take the time to build their midsection to the point were they have that revered look, and these numbers drop dramatically for people who are older than 35 because it is harder to attain as you get older.

So what are you going to do about this? Well, my advice is to not care about it. If you really wanted to look like that you would already have taken the necessary steps to get yourself moving towards it. If you don’t, you probably don’t place that high an importance on it. From my experience, looking that way doesn’t bring you any extra happiness – the world doesn’t start treating you any differently just because you have a great body. Your problems don’t go away just because you look better than everyone at the gym. In fact, other than achieving a goal, the process of building a great midsection brought me very little fulfillment or happiness. The difference between a flat midsection and a ripped midsection is the last 20% of getting a great body, the first 80% is getting to a point where you look good. I have noticed that happiness does come to those who work to get a good body. So my guess is that most would be happy to just look better.

Looking better is very easy if you don’t already look good. All it requires is that you do something active. It doesn’t really matter so long as it’s something that you don’t normally do that requires that you move around. Some people like parking their car far away from the door, some like reading the newspaper while walking on a treadmill, some like making multiple trips up and down stairs to achieve a task that could have been accomplished with one well thought-out trip, some will join a gym, while others will take up playing a sports or a musical instrument. It doesn’t really matter what you do, so long as it gets you moving. Moving burns energy that you might normally store as fat and it gives the muscles a workout that they need to grow and remain strong.

A different way to look at it would be to say that if you want to look better, stop doing something that requires you to remain relatively still; television is a good example of an effortless movement-less activity, ordering in dinner instead of making it or spending time playing most video games or surfing the Internet are other examples of low movement activities. Ideally you will be able to liberate some time from ceasing a sedentary activity and fill that time with something that requires that you do a little more activity. You’ll benefit from this change in behavior very quickly.

If your goal is to feel and look better, just start doing something today. It doesn’t have to be much, but it has to be something. Regardless of how small it is, a first step is a first step and it is always the beginning of something new. Remember, it is hard to look great, but it’s easy to look better, just do something.

Consider doing some body weight exercises to help build that stronger body because:

• The body will adapt quickly to them because it is a reasonable load. I don’t know if this is true but I’ve always found that I gain strength very quickly with body weight exercises.
• They are very functional - the strength generally lends itself to real activities.
• They do not cause undo stress to the body because the movements are natural.
• They are difficult to do at the beginning. Yeah, but anything that you have not done before is difficult to do at the beginning.
• Most people don’t and can’t do them, probably because they are hard and people tend to shy away from difficult tasks.
• They add variety to your strength training workouts.
• They can improve symmetry and will balance strength. Consider one-legged squats, they guarantee that you work each leg equally.

Pull-ups are, in my opinion, the best body weight exercise that you can do because they engage many of the muscles of the back, as well as working the biceps and the rear deltoids. They require a lot of strength to do and there are a number of different variations that allow you to shift the focus onto different parts of the back and body. For example, narrow grip will work the middle back, the biceps and the rear deltoids more, wide grip focus the load on the lats to help build back width and off level pull-ups, while a more sport specific move, will focus more effort one side of the body.

Other body weight exercises you can try:

• Dips – these really work the triceps and chest muscles.
• Body row – great for working the middle back and the rear deltoids
• Push-ups – an often-overlooked classic that works the chest muscles very effectively. Try placing the hands closer together to increase the load on the triceps and middle chest.
• Various single legged squat movements – if you are concerned about being able to do these, consider the movement of getting into and out of a car as proof that you can.
• Front and side planking moves – great of building core strength
• Leg raises (hanging, lying, Roman chair) – fantastic for building lower ab strength
• Various balancing moves – I’ve found the starfish position were you are standing on one leg and have your arms and other leg full extended to really tax my legs and lower back.

Supersets: You can also benefit from adding body weight exercise to weighted movements to create challenging supersets:

• Narrow grip push-ups finish off a set of machine flies to complete chest failure.
• Hanging leg raises complement weighted crunches nicely.
• Dips and pull-ups can be done together for a great push pull set that will work the entire upper body.

Next time you’re looking for a new challenge, improved results or a change to your workout routine try giving some of these body weight exercises a try.

We’ll maybe.

People have six pack abs because their muscles can be seen. Most of the time it’s because the person is lean - usually less than 10 percent body fat – to maintaining this level of leanness requires fairly strict adherence to a clean diet. However, this summer I saw something that changed the way I view ab training. I rode past a guy who had really big ab muscles. It wasn’t that they were well defined it was that they looked like Mr. Olympia abs on an average sized guy. It wasn’t until I got back to the gym that I realized the significance of what I saw.

I had been on vacation, camping in the east coast of Canada, and I hadn’t done any ab work. I had brought my bike and I got at least 2 hours of riding in everyday, but I had also brought along my bad camping habits, eating a box of cookies and drinking 3 or 4 beers a night. I gained a few pounds and lost some muscle mass from my upper body. Sadly, my 6 pack was gone, buried under a layer or two of too much enjoyment.

When I got back to the gym and training, I noticed that my ab muscles were still really hard. In fact, they didn’t feel like they had gotten any smaller and when I went though my routine it was clear that I had lost very little strength. The only difference was a layer of fat. Then it struck me, if I want to have my abs visible but don’t want to have to constantly worry about what I eat, just make the ab muscles big enough to be seen through the layer of fat. That’s what I had seen on the guy in the summer, huge ab muscles that were visible regardless of what was in front of them.

That was the day I change the way I train my abs. I made the decision to make them as big as I could so that they could be seen, even when I wasn’t paying particularly close attention to what I was eating. It meant treating them like a large muscle group (having their own specific training day and prioritizing their training). This was new to me, and from what I read it is not done by most people.

I used to treat my abs as an after thought, throw in a couple of sets whenever I felt like it and I’d always try to get a good burn from contracting the muscles very hard instead of working to make sure they were fatigued as a result of the weight they were lifting. I would also tear through the sets as quickly as I could to get them over with. Once I slowed down and focused on tiring the muscles completely, I began to see results. The hanging leg raises, weighted cable and DB crunches, and weighted machine crunches replaced my body weight only exercise that I had been doing to create defined hard muscles. The outcome has been fantastic. My body fat ranges between 8% and 12% and I have a six-pack regardless of where it stands. My body looks better when I’m carrying less fat, but my abs are always there.

If someone was to ask me to give one piece of advice it would be this: eat only enough so that you are hungry in 3 hours and then repeat. I think it makes the biggest impact to overall health.

I say this because:

• Digestion is very taxing on the body. Eating smaller meals avoids this.
• Digestion can break down nutrients contained in food, lessoning digestion time can increase the nutrient yield from a meal.
• Quickened food absorption into the blood will help to stabilize sugar levels, allow for more consistent energy levels and the quick availability of nutrients improves exercise recovery potential.
• Complete digestion improves bowel movement frequency and consistency.
• Most junk or fast food meals cannot be digested quickly enough to be consumed automatically increasing the quality of the food that you eat.

Moving to this type of eating can be difficult however, as it requires a fairly substantial change in your eating habits. The three square meals a day approach that most of us were raised on was based on the need to maintain an 9-12 hour work day, allowing for big enough sized meals that would help someone avoid hunger until the next meal. This approach is effective at doing this, but it isn’t ideal for most people any more, given that we have improved freedom to eat whenever we need to vs. whenever we are allowed to.

The consequence to not eating whenever we need to, or to eating to avoid hunger for longer than 3 hours is fat gain unless you are particularly active. I say this because the body adapts to getting food every 5-6 hours and will come to rely on transient body fat to fuel energy requirements not met through eating – those periods of time when a meal is being digested and has no impact on blood levels. If we introduce food every 3 hours, we decrease the reliance on body fat to power our energy needs.

It will take you about a month of eating smaller meals every 3 hours before it becomes part of your daily life, but you can enjoy the improved health benefits after only a week or so. If your schedule and work allow for it, give it a try. It’s helped me add lean muscle mass and lower my body fat.

Here is lesson 6 from the 13 things that Eric Cressey learned in 2006:

You see, goodwill — the willingness to help others — never runs out unless you allow it to by your own ignorance. These guys offered me tremendous information and expected nothing in return, but now that I’m in more of a position to help them out, their goodwill has paid off.