The truth about crunches! We all seek answers to achieving ripped abs. The truth about crunches is that they are good for our abdominal muscles, but they will not give you the ripped abs that you want. To get ripped abs, you need to work on fat burning exercises that will burn overall fat, watching what we eat and eliminating stress from our lives.

Doing crunches may be stopping you from getting six pack abs because it doesn't focus on what needs to be trained. Crunches strengthen, stabilize and develop the abdominal area. But to get six pack abs, we need to focus on overall fat burning.

Exercises that have a fat burning effect are overall exercises that help increase our metabolism, which allows body fat to be burned. The increased metabolism rids the body of excess fat in our abdominal region, when this occurs, the six-pack abs under the fat will become more visible.

Metabolic activity has been shown to increase through resistance training exercises. Increased metabolic activity allows the body to utilize the fat as a fuel source and reduce overall body fat. The muscles that we develop from resistance training makes our body become better able to use our body fat to fuel our activities.

Watching what we eat is important as well. By eating quality foods, which are rich in protein, fat, carbohydrates, vitamins and minerals, we fuel our body to function better. Instead of eating 3 big meals per day, we can increase our meals to 5-6 and decrease the meal portions. This will allow us to maintain our energy and blood sugar levels throughout the day.

We should decrease the amount of stress we have in our lives. Stress makes our body release a hormone called Cortisol and causes the body to be in an emergency-readiness situation. When this occurs our body stores fat in the stomach to prepare for an emergency situation.

We should find ways to decrease our levels of stress by doing activities that help calm our bodies down. Activities like: deep breathing, meditation, yoga, and tai chi have shown to be effective in reducing a person's stress levels.

Crunches, in truth, are good for you but to achieve defined ripped abs, we need to understand we need to focus on other factors. Activities like resistance training, watching what we eat and eliminating stress from our lives, will help us achieve our ripped six-pack abs.