need to do thousands of crunches, train on fancy machines, invest in expensive supplements, or use fancy powders.
People have been building stage ready type physiques and sporting six pack abs for hundreds, if not thousands of years. Back in those days, they didn’t have access to fancy potions, pills, berries, shake thingies, or gadgets to help them out. All they used were the basic essentials. Hard work & nutrition.
Let’s use inmates as an example. Yes I’m talking about prisoners! These guys are some of the most ripped dudes on the planet…and they never get to use 100% pure ion exchange whey, fat burners, or take expensive supplements to enhance their physiques. They don’t get to order fancy equipment or gadgets off the internet. The only choice these guys have is to just keep it old school!
Nothing has really changed since the old days…the fundamentals for getting ripped have pretty much been the same for years. So save yourself a bunch of time and money, and just stick to the basics.
Here is a list of 31 simple tips (mostly fundamentals) that will help you reach that goal of sporting washboard six pack abs when you get on stage.
1. Clean up your diet. In order to burn fat and reveal your washboard six pack abs, it is important to eat a balanced diet that is made up of protein, healthy fats, and some carbohydrates. Protein helps form the building blocks of muscle and it is probably the most essential macronutrient of them all, mainly because your body burns a ton of calories digesting protein.
Calculating the right amount of carbohydrates to eat can be tricky (and I will have to save this for another post), but a good strategy to use is to eat a moderate amount of carbs throughout the day but eat your largest carb meal of the day post-workout. When you intake carbs post-workout your body quickly absorbs the carbs directly into the muscle tissue, promoting growth. Post-workout carbs also help your muscles recover faster, which will give you better results faster.
Next up on the menu is fat. Now many people believe that eating fat will make you fat (marketing hype really), but in reality, healthy polyunsaturated and monounsaturated fats such as fish oils, nuts, and olive oil will actually help you burn more fat than a low fat diet will. I recommend using a ratio of 20-30% of dietary fat in your diet which will kelp keep insulin levels stable, and help prevent you from eating too many calories from fat.
Lastly, be sure to include plenty of fiber, raw vegetables, and a superfood or two with each meal. Vegetables are jam packed with tons of fiber, antioxidants, vitamins, and minerals which are all essential for building a lean body and ripped six pack abs.
2. Eat every 2-4 hours and be sure to eat 5-7 small meals daily. Eating smaller meals more frequently is a surefire way to boost your metabolism and create a thermogenic effect inside the body. By combining lean protein with the correct types and amounts of green leafy vegetables, good carbs, and fats at the right times, you will super charge your metabolism and turn your body into a 24-7 fat burning machine.
3. Always eat breakfast. This is the most important meal of the day. I know we are all crunched for time, but there are quick & healthy breakfast ideas out there. Trust me, eating breakfast will give your metabolism a daily jump start and keep your fat loss efforts on track all day.
4. Don’t buy sexy food. Keep foods like cookies, cakes, frozen pizzas, etc out of thehouse at all times. You will be less likely to cheat this way if you know what I mean.
5. Prepare your meals in advance. By planning your meals in advance, you will have prepared healthy food to eat throughout the day and be less likely to grab something unhealthy if you get a food craving. To make things easy, it is best to take one day of the week (typically on the weekend) and prepare all of your healthy meals for the week.
6. Pound water. Since our bodies are over 70% water, drinking water is essential for optimal health. Water helps prime the body for fat loss, as well as flush out harmful toxins. Not drinking enough can lead to a water imbalance in the body, which can increase your risk of disease. Drink at least 80-100 ounces of water daily.
7. Don’t keep it 100, keep it 80/20. When training to build a great physique, we so often get caught up in eating proteins and trying to build lean muscle, that in the process we disrupt the natural acid/alkaline balance in the body and become overly acidic. It is hard to train and recover effectively when suffering with the annoying effects of acidosis.
Proteins are acid forming foods and we must eat alkaline forming foods to neutralize the acid wastes from protein consumption. This means that you should probably be eating a bunch more veggies with that chicken breast than you usually do.
Finding a perfect balance can be challenging and confusing at first, but a good way to approach it is to try to maintain an 80% alkaline and 20% acid ratio. That means that in order to maintain a healthy, balanced pH, you need to eat a diet that consists of 80% alkaline forming foods and 20% acid forming foods.
8. Be a perimeter whore. Shop the outside isles of the supermarket instead of the middle isles. Most of the fatty, processed, junk foods are kept in the middle isles.
9. Eat before you are starving. If you wait until you are absolutely starving to eat, you will most likely end up overeating.
10. Avoid processed foods. These top my list of foods to avoid because not only will they make you fat, but they can cause a variety of deadly health problems. Processed foods contain no natural antioxidants, phytonutrients, fiber, vitamins, or minerals, and eating them puts a strain on your digestive system.
Processed foods are also very high in sugar, salt, food additives, and toxic fats. The human body was not designed to be able to fully process and digest this type of man-made food so avoid processed foods at all costs for a healthy and lean body. Some examples of processed foods are (white bread, breakfast cereal, chips, white rice, etc). These types of foods have no nutritional value and do absolutely nothing good for your body.
11. Avoid toxic fats. You don’t have to go far these days to hear people talk about the dangers of killer trans fats and saturated fats. In case you have been on the moon for the past few years I will share a few facts about these deadly fats. Trans fats are basically just chemically altered fats and oils.
A few examples of foods laden with toxic fats are: snack bars, breakfast cereals, rolls, pastries, crackers, and many other packaged and processed foods. Like I mentioned earlier, be sure to shop the perimeter of the store because most of the garbage food is in the aisles.
12. Avoid sugary foods & drinks. Let’s face it, sugar tastes great, but it WILL make you fat and unhealthy. I call sugar the most powerful drug in the world because it has the most addicts across the world than most other drugs combined! FACT.
Here’s the thing. When you eat sugar, your body creates a cycle that constantly demands more and more sugar. Not only that, but sugar also raises insulin levels!
If you are not familiar with insulin, it is a very powerful hormone that tells your body to store fat. Over time, if you continue to eat sugary foods, your cells will become resistant to this over-production of insulin and you could end up with type 2 diabetes. Sadly, this happens quite often these days.
13. Never eat processed meats. Now I have to admit, I love a great deli sandwich or hot dog at a ball game, but buyer beware. Packaged meats and cold cuts contain nitrates, which many experts believe can cause deadly cancers. Processed meats also contain dangerously high amounts of salt and saturated fats, which can lead to hypertension, high cholesterol, and heart disease.
If that wasn’t bad enough, eating these foods is guaranteed to cause you to gain weight. So avoid foods like bacon, hot dogs, sausage, salami, bologna, and any other processed deli meat like the plague and cook your meat yourself.
14. Discriminate against white flour. White bread and white flour products will make you fat. Plain and simple. Not only do they have no nutritional value, but they are converted to sugar by your body just as fast as cake and ice cream. Eating foods made with white or refined flour is definitely a sure-fire way to add some quick pounds of blubber!
Tip: Be sure to read all bread labels carefully because many clever food manufacturers try to disguise white bread as wheat bread by adding molasses to it so it looks darker. This is a pretty sneaky tactic…but don’t fall for it!
15. Don’t eat a science project. Do you have any idea how many toxic chemicals are in our food supply? Do you realize that these toxins are robbing you of your health and probably killing your efforts in the gym? Every time you eat processed foods you are also consuming bleaching agents, flavoring agents, chemical preservatives, texturizers, emulsifiers, as well as synthetic dyes.
If that isn’t enough to gross you out, get this, most chemical food additives are made from coal tar or petroleum products!
Most foods that are grown non-organically are likely tainted with harmful toxic chemicals, as well as herbicides and pesticides. These toxins overwhelm the liver, increase your risk of disease, and can also make you fat.
If you value your health and want to be fit, steer clear of foods containing dangerous chemicals.
CHECK BACK IN NEXT WEEK FOR PART II AND THE REMAINING 16 TIPS!
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