When you decide you want to improve your appearance and develop a powerful abs region, you probably focus on the gym. However, your best ideas should concentrate on your kitchen, for it is here that your dreams can be fulfilled.

Daily visits to the gym and regular workouts will be wasted if you don't make changes to your eating habits. Keep a food diary for a week, recording all the food and drink you consume. Analyse its contents for protein, carbohydrates and fats, either using information from the packaging or the internet. Find out how many calories you take in daily compared with what your optimum intake is for your preferred weight. You must cut down the amount you eat each day but eat more smaller meals. This increases the metabolism which raises the rate that fat is burned.

If your abs let you down then you are probably carrying too much fat. It's an unfortunate fact that the stomach region is the first to store fat and the last to release it. This has evolutionary and survival origins, as the fat is stored there to protect the body's vital organs. Instinct says that abs crunching exercises are needed to eliminate this excess. Wrong! Crunches and other painful sounding exercises may develop stronger muscles but you won't be able to see them as they'll still be covered by your layer of fat.

To reduce it and produce your show off abs you have to work hard in the gym or when running. It used to be said that long periods of low effort activity would bring about fat loss. However, it's been found that the body soon adjusts to this regime and is able to cope with little effect on the fat store. You have to shock the body into action. To do this exercise at various activity levels with brief periods of lower level activity in between.

If you remember being made to run 200 metre intervals at school with a 200 metre walk between each, then this idea is used in fat loss now. I don't suggest you even think about 200 metre repetitions now, but if you're running you can use the same principle, with faster and recovery runs of between 30 seconds and a minute each. In the gym, choose a programme with harder and easier sections, sometimes called cross country or aerobic workouts. On the free weights and weights machines, try up to 3 sets of 10 -12 repetitions with a weight you can just complete the set. You have to make the body work, it soon recovers,

As it does, you'll start to feel fresher and fitter and even better, you'll start to see your abs again!

William Metcalfe is a strength training athletics coach and a BAWLA weights instructor currently working at a UK university gym. His website is www.teen-gym.com and he can be contacted at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it