Hi!

I have been using my free weights for a few months now, not really taking it too seriously, but I have now decided to go to a gym and will start soon.

I have just turned 20 and weight 167 lbs, I have a body fat calculating machine at home and my bf is 15%. I know that for abs you really need the bf around 10% so that your abs can be seen.

I do not want to lose any weight as I was quite skinny to begin with and feel a lot more confident with how I look, its just that I would like for my abs to show a bit more, I have read in places that cardio work is good and also cutting down on the number of calories you eat per day.

What is the best way to get around reducing my bf?

Thanks again, keep up this excellent site!

Hi!

I have been using my free weights for a few months now, not really taking it too seriously, but I have now decided to go to a gym and will start soon.

I have just turned 20 and weight 167 lbs, I have a body fat calculating machine at home and my bf is 15%. I know that for abs you really need the bf around 10% so that your abs can be seen.

I do not want to lose any weight as I was quite skinny to begin with and feel a lot more confident with how I look, its just that I would like for my abs to show a bit more, I have read in places that cardio work is good and also cutting down on the number of calories you eat per day.

What is the best way to get around reducing my bf?

Thanks again, keep up this excellent site!

4/5 times cardio per week (30 to 45min per sesion) and normal food (bread without something on it, normal dinner, etc.) worked for me. in two weeks i dropped 1% bf, i went from 13 to 12. i would advise you to cardio a lot and keep your heartrate between 65 to 75%. dont eat candy bla bla :)

keep in mind... your body needs calories, so dont eat too less!

As Ruurd said and of course you will want to be doing weight training 3-4 times a week too to ensure you are stimulating the muscles. Don't get caught in the trap of thinking that doing loads of ab work will make them show through quicker, abs will show with lower bodyfat - as you already know. I would do abs once or twice a week tops. Diet is most important when trying to alter the composition of ones's body, so it would probably help if we knew what that was in order to help further.

Just reduce your calories and do heavy ab work (heavy meaning heavy weight, not a lot of ab sessions - I would recommend 1 or 2 per week as well).

I like MAXOT workouts myself. You should look into it. :)

Thanks for the replies guys,

What sort of calorie intake should I be looking at per day?

Really appreciate the responses.

There seem to be a few different calculations that people use to work out their caloric requirements. I unfortunately don't know any of them myself, but for someone of your weight I would perhaps begin at around 1900 cals first of all and then go from there. If after 2 weeks you find that you are not losing fat then you may need to reduce these calories or increase cardio or alter your macronutrients etc. As I said, show us your current diet and we can see what its like.

The best way to get caloric needs is to see your Dr. and get professionally tested. They report back your BMR, RMR, body fat %, etc.

Another good way to determine the values is to use a system like mybodycomp.com. Their values are based on your body's measurements. The RMR and BF% are determined by statistical average of the population with your measurements. There is some degree of error due to calculation and deviation, but you'll be very close.

There are other mathmatical calculations to determine RMR and caloric needs. There is a calculator on BB.com that will take all the different equations and then averages them. Like the body measurement, there will be error and using this method, the error will be higher.