Everyone wants to have great female abs, without a doubt abs are the part of your body which people are most likely going to sit up and take notice when you walk past. This is the first part in a three part series of information on how to achieve great female abs.

When most people make the decision to improve their abs they usually set about some mad routine, which usually includes a ton of sit-ups or exercises, which are designed to target the mid section of their body. While it is possible to improve your abs by doing stomach based exercises you wont be able to see the benefits until you deal directly with fat.

Fat is the main reason why people fail to achieve the abs they want. You can do all the abs exercises you want but if your body fat percentage is too high you will never get to see them.

I’ve heard people with a lot of excess stomach fat joke “I have a six pack, it’s just under a layer of fat!” While this is meant as a joke, this is exactly the case for 99% of people.

You can have the best abs in the world but if you don’t strip the fat from on top of them you will never get to see them. So how do you do this? Well unlike most people I’m not going to tell you to go buy some strange looking stomach machine, or do 10,000 sit-ups per day, what I want you to do is cardio.

Cardio Vascular exercise is not only good overall for your health, but its one of the best ways to lower your body fat percentage. Cardio burns fat!

Did you know that it takes extended exercise before you will actually start to burn fat? Fat is one of the best energy storages we have in our body, as there is plenty of it. The problem though is that it is notoriously difficult to break down as use properly. Before our bodies even think about using fat for energy it first burns through other storage.

Try to concentrate on your heart rate when trying to burn fat, it needs to be kept I the fat burning zone.  What I am about to tell you is only applicable if you are already in decent shape, if you are over weight then you need to be up nearer 80% of you maximum heart rate, this ensures that you lose weight first before you try to tone. Exercising in the fat burning zone 60-65% of your maximum heart rate is where you will burn the optimum percentage of fat because the body has enough time to break down the fat and use it as fat, go above this percentage and work harder and the body needs energy faster and will result in burning carbohydrates.

TIP! Work out what your fat burning zone is by deducting your age from 220, then working out 60% of that number. For example for a 20-year-old female: 220 minus 20 is 200, 60% of 200 is 120 beats per minute.

Ok that’s the first instalment of this series then, I hope this has helped clear up the myth that in order to get great abs you need to do sit-up until you drop, the truth is that although you d need strong abs, no matter how big ad strong they are, you will never see them if you have a layer of fat covering them, so get out there and do cardio, cardio cardio and I promise your female abs will look great!