Best flat stomach exercises

The Best Flat Stomach Workout

If you want your belly to look smaller and in shape, here are some best flat stomach workout ideas.

First of all, if you want faster results, you should stimulate those stomach muscles every 2-3 days, so you’ll want to do the following workout more than once per week, while allowing for at least 48 hours of recovery between workouts. You can do this workout as part of a cardio workout or weightlifting workout, or figure out a way to creatively include the exercises as part of a different workout.

Flat Stomach Step 1: Begin your flat stomach workout by getting some blood flow to the abdominal area. That can be achieved with a brief 5-10 minute cardio warm up, followed by some of the movement patterns I discuss in the episode How To Warm Up and Cool Down.

Flat Stomach Step 2: Next, choose one exercise for each of the abdominal muscle groups, and also an exercise for the low back. Do one set of each exercise until you can’t maintain good form anymore. And yes, that means that you should not push through with bad form until you get a hernia.

Rectus abdominis: For your rectus abdominis, exercise choices include flexing motions of the spine, such as crunches and crunch variations, V-ups, sit-ups and sit-up variations, hanging leg raises, or knee-ups. Front planks are also quite good for this muscle group.

External and internal obliques: Twisting and rotating motions are good exercises because they work both the external and internal oblique muscles. That is because if you rotate to your left, your left external oblique and your right internal oblique are doing the work, and vice versa. Twisting motions include Russian Twists, Cable Torso Twists, and the woodchopper.

Transverses abdominis: The transverses abdominis is an interesting muscle group, because it doesn’t really move you through a range of motion as much as support the stomach and the gut. So when you suck in your stomach, that’s the transverses abdominis muscles working. Although you can work this muscle group anywhere, such as sucking in your stomach while you’re driving in your car, sitting on an airplane, or standing in line at the grocery store, you can also make it work pretty hard with an exercise like front planks.

Low back muscles: Finally, the low back muscles can be worked with a simple contraption at the gym that allows you to do low back extensions or, if you’re not at a gym, you can do the same exercise on a stability ball, or an exercise called the Superman.

Perform 8-12 repetitions for each of the exercises described above, then go back to the beginning and start again, completing a total of 3-4 circuits.