A) Can people still enjoy weight loss and effective weight management even if Mediterranean diet is high in fat?
It is a known fact that Mediterranean diet is high in fat. However, these are made from monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats which important for your body. They are healthy fats compared to the saturated fats found in a typical American diet. It should be pointed also that fat is not the determining factor for weight loss. It is calorie consumption that determines optimum weight loss and management. So you should lower your calorie consumption to get the full healthy benefits of Mediterranean diet.

B) In simple terms, what is the principal difference between the American diet and the Mediterranean diet?
The focus of these two diets is different. The Mediterranean diet favors vegetables, breads, fruits, cereals, nuts, olive oils, and potatoes. On the other hand, the American diet is usually heavy on red meat, poultry, and eggs.

C) Is it true that Mediterranean diet can lower the risk of heart disease?
Based on scientific research, Mediterranean diet has played a significant role in lowering the incidence of cardiovascular disorder in the Mediterranean region. This type of diet enables you to choose a lot of healthy foods. It also promotes a holistic approach for enjoying better health.

D) Is an exercise program included in the Mediterranean diet?
Exercise plays an important role for Mediterranean diet. When this diet was developed, the people of Mediterranean were already a big fan of exercise and physical activities. This is the basis why Mediterranean diet includes regular exercises in its overall program. Essentially, a daily one-hour walk is needed. You should also perform once a week full body exercises.

E) Is Mediterranean diet different from Low Carb diet?
Mediterranean diet is substantially different from Low Carb diet. For one thing, the Mediterranean program has a lower protein component. You will only get 15 percent calories from the protein of Mediterranean diet.

F) People noticed that wine is an important part of Mediterranean diet. What is the recommended daily wine consumption?
It is highly recommended to consume low to moderate amounts of wine daily. Usually, men should get approximately 5 percent calories from wine while women should get 2.5 calories from wine consumption.

G) Final words
There are loads of benefits that you can enjoy from Mediterranean diet. This diet focuses on healthier food options like root crops, fruits, cereals, breads, vegetables, and Omega 3-rich foods. You will be able to prevent heart diseases if you follow the Mediterranean diet.

About the Author - Eva Alexander writes for Mediterranean Diet, her personal hobby blog focused on tips to eat healthy on the Mediterranean way.

It works as well to lose belly fat if you can go the extra mile and chisel out the abdominals to a totally ripped set of muscles. You definitely will look sexy with a six-pack. Nevertheless, the priority must remain on losing belly fat and gaining flat abs. This remains an illusion for many people today.

The fact that you would like to develop flat abs fast is given. The question is how. It is easy to transform a fatty belly into flat abs and to do it fast. To begin with, you should realize the reason why it is so hard for many people to attain flat abs. Popular fast foods that have become the staple for our societies. Yet these foods are laden with high levels of concentrated fats. These fats are then matched with docile lifestyles revolving around remote controlled televisions, computers and play stations. The result is phenomenal fat deposits in the body, since more fat calories are being ingested other than what is needed for energy. If you want to craft some flat abs fast, you must quit on these dangerous fast-food diets and begin eating healthy natural foods without the saturated fats.

No matter how saggy your stomach looks, underneath the fat are a set of flat abs. As such, the next step must be to eliminate the fats that have been superimposed on the flat abs. When the body gains a lot of excess solid fats, there are some preferential areas to deposits them. The belly has no bone structures to protect internal organs and thus the body uses the fat to further secure these internal organs by erecting additional layers of fats on top of the abs muscles. Being a preferential area for fat deposits, the only way to reduce belly fat is to train hard and long. Join an exercise program, preferably a cardiovascular training routine where you give an hour of high intensity engagement, for at least three days every week. Enforcing a regular and consistent exercise regime is one way of getting flat abs fast, since it facilitates the burning of many calories.

You must also alter your eating habits so as to amplify your metabolism rate and efficiency. Eating small but frequent meals is one recommendation. Ensure that you eat at least six small meals a day. Avoid saturated fats and drink a lot of water. Again, ensure there is a calorie deficit in your diet plan, which means that you burn more calories than you take in during the day. That deficit will be catered for by the fat deposits, which can be synthesized for energy and thus leaning out your belly.

Concisely therefore, the best way to get flat abs fast is through body fat reduction simultaneous with amplification of the metabolism rate and efficiency. Cardio exercises and healthy dieting will get this done. If you can then complement this by several abs weight-training exercises like crunches and sit ups, the flat abs will come up even faster.

Let’s start with metabolism. Metabolism efficiency will involve several things. One of the reasons why your tummy is bulky and probably sagging is because of fat deposits. The fat is being stored in solid form because it was not broken down for energy after ingestion. To avoid this trend, you must break up your meals to small but frequent meals to ensure that all the food you eat is digested and not stored up as fats. Eat at least six times in a day and then eat only healthy foods.

If you are seriously wondering how to get flat abs, then you don’t need telling that junk food is not for you. Incorporate whole grain meals, oatmeal, vegetables, fish, fruits, chicken and yogurt in your diet. Once your foods are healthy and the meals well planned, you need to cleanse the system. A herbal cleansing product can be used twice or thrice to get rid of the chronic wastes clogged in your digestive system. After that, you need to drink a lot of plain water on a daily basis. Water helps in increasing the digestibility of foods, transportation and absorption. It also helps to cleanse the body since hydration enables the efficient excretion of metabolic wastes.

By the time you are done with amplifying your metabolic efficiency, you should be able to digest all foods fast and fully, without having to store some as fats. One sign that you are in the optimal metabolic state is a good appetite whereby you get hungry after equal time intervals daily. The ability to always eat six meals a day without feeling clogged means that the meals are being broken down fully and fast enough.

Finally, you have to burn accumulated body fat deposits. Primarily, keep the diet healthy and natural. You must reduce your intake of saturated fats to a ratio of 0.0 % in all your meals. Again, it is essential that you create a calorie deficit in your diet plan. The deficit means that you expend more calories than those you burn in the day. This can be maintained up until there are no fats stored up. Consequently, this introduces one of the most important elements of weight management.

Exercises are not a choice if you want to know how to get flat abs. It is only exercise that will help expend more calories than you consume. Three sessions of cardio exercise in a week, for about 45 minutes in each session, will help get the fat content down. Such a program is effective, healthy and with long lasting results. Now you know how to get flat abs. Do not entertain any other suggestion that does not incorporate these two items.

Mini workouts provide a great alternative for the lazy or busy person, and they can be just as effective as other training programs with only a fraction of the time invested. That said, they are taxing. We must always keep in mind the fundamental principle of progressive overload. If you want to make your body increasingly energy efficient, stronger, slimmer, and you want those flat abs, it’s very important that you push your body past previous limits on a regular basis. One of the ways of adding intensity, which is the measure of overloading your body, is by condensing the workout as much as possible. A person that can complete a full body workout in 20 minutes is much fitter than the person who needs 40 minutes to complete the same workout.

When aiming for flat abs and weight loss it’s essential we stick to big compound movements which work the largest muscles and require the most energy to perform. Fortunately for all of us, we don’t need a gym for this kind of training. Bodyweight training is a great way to tighten up a workout and focus on the essentials. This will reduce our workouts to three or four exercises only. Each exercise should be performed as quickly as possible to failure, that is, until you are not capable or performing another repetition. And then you should move immediately into the next exercise with no rest in between.

This small condensed circuit is very intense and very effective. In fact, it takes less than 2 minutes even if you can perform over 50 repetitions of each exercise. If you’re in decent shape or you can not perform 15 repetitions of each exercise, another set can be added after a 2 to 3 minute rest, making the entire workout less than 8 minutes. If you cannot perform 10 repetitions per exercise, you ought to use free weights that you can move for 20 to 50 repetitions.

The best exercises for this are pushups, bodyweight squats, v-sits or crunches, and pull-ups if you have a pull-up bar. Pull-ups are not essential for this circuit. One should work the pulling muscles, the lats and biceps at least one day a week, but if its inconvenient, it doesn’t need to be a component of your mini circuit, which should be performed daily, if not twice a day, 5 or 6 days a week. This workout is so short and sweet there’s no reason not to have a try. It’s important to remember though that you need to push each exercise to the limit, and when the circuit is complete, rest. It’s that easy. Do this daily for one to two sets and you’ll see amazing weight loss results and flat abs shortly.

It is absolutely imperative that our flat abs workout plans don’t ignore or diminish the fact that we don’t particularly like working out, and that those feelings are not about to change. The first few weeks we all make it to the gym and give it our all. But after that short time we begin to notice that there are no immediate results, and we get frustrated. When we get frustrated, we start to sabotage our efforts by making excuses or looking at training sessions as a burden to an already tight schedule.

At this point you need to reassess your goals and motivations. You see, good weight losers don’t assume that they’re going to fall in love with training. They make their flat abs workout plans assuming they’re going to get tired of training and that training is uncomfortable. When you assume the worst, you’ll be able to create an intelligent plan for dealing with your own conditioned laziness.

And that plan needs to bear the mark of successful weight losers. Successful weight losers don’t squeeze workouts in, they build their schedules around workouts. Successful weight losers don’t make excuses or postpone sessions, they show up every session, regardless of their condition that day. These two factors are the keys to long term weight loss. If your flat abs workout plans can incorporate these two factors, you’ll be a success.

Let’s look at each one a little more closely. One of the worst habits a person can have is to squeeze in a workout at the end of a long day. You’re tired. You’re frustrated. All you want to do is relax. You are never going to make sustainable gains if you have to fight your natural feelings. You need to alter your schedule to account for these states of being, and put your training first. Train when you are fresh. Train first thing in the morning before you can second guess your sessions or make excuses.

It doesn’t need to be a monster session; it just needs to be consistent. Wake up 20 minutes earlier and go for a 15 minute jog or push yourself through a short and intense bodyweight circuit of push-ups, squats and sit-ups. This will give you a nice metabolic boost, and it will get you in the habit of putting your health first. If you have the time or energy later in the day then hit the gym for a longer session, but hey, if you can’t make it, then no worries, you’ve already completed your essential training. You can approach the day without the guilt or pressure of training at other times.

The second factor is the simple act of showing up for the game. You don’t need to play every time, but you need to show up. If you are legitimately hurt or sick, then don’t train. But don’t sit at home and watch TV during the time you’ve allotted to train. Go to the gym or get your running shorts on and either sit there and watch others train or do something very very light with a part of your body that isn’t injured or stretch for a while. This will condition your mind to keep this time for training and thoughts of backing out won’t become habitual.

Keep these two factors in mind:
1. Train first and train fresh
2. Show up every session, regardless of your condition

If your flat abs workout plans include these two components, you will succeed in the long run. Adding extra sessions later in the day to your short early morning sessions will only speed up your progress, but they needn’t be the stressful and guilty burden that causes so many flat abs strivers to fail. Good training and even better thinking to you!

So let’s assume your abs have flattened a bit and the love handles are shrinking, but you have yet to bring out definition or tone. For most people the combination of interval and resistance training with a proper diet is more than enough to shred the abs. But there are a few of us that for whatever reason plateau once we near that elusive goal. So our workout plans need to adapt just as our bodies have in order to hit our abs with more intensity.

Let’s look quickly at the body of a sprinter versus the body of a marathon runner. Until recently (cross training is much more prominent these days) marathon runners tended to be slender, carry little muscle, and lack the detailed muscle tone we see in sprinters. And this had everything to do with the type of training. Sprinting requires and develops fast twitch muscle fibers, whereas jogging develops primarily slow twitch. This results in muscular hypertrophy in sprinters which builds their bodies and shows greater definition. This is what we are looking for.

Marathon runners by comparison, despite the fact that they run for hours on end and have lean midsections, rarely show the rippling six packs of sprinters. There are two reasons for this. The first, as I’ve just said is due to the fact that sprinting is a sport requiring fast twitch muscle fiber development resulting in larger muscles. The second reason is that sprinting stresses our nervous systems and muscles to a much larger degree, forcing the release of human growth hormone and other powerful fat burning and muscle building hormones. Jogging for long periods of time on the other hand can cause our bodies to release cortisol, a stress hormone which tells our bodies to store fat.

So if you’ve reached the point of flat abs, jogging and long cardio sessions may actually be detrimental to your progress. It’s important to recognize this peculiar hormonal response and utilize contrary training techniques in our ab workouts. We’ll need to stick to short and intense training sessions rather than longer cardio sessions, and we’ll need to concentrate a little more on exercises which stress our cores.

In my own training I reduce my abs workout (assuming, like I’ve said I’ve already reduced my belly fat and have just to bring out definition) to short intense abdominal exercises followed by short and intense interval training or sprinting. The abs exercises pre-exhaust my core before I sprint, and then running forces my core into overdrive to keep me stable while running. It also works supporting muscles that are hard to reach with normal abdominal exercises.

My preferred exercises at this level of training are those which draw more power from the lower abs through lifting the legs rather than those which concentrate on the upper abs through crunches. I do reclining leg raises on a decline bench or hanging (from pull-up bar) leg raises, for 3 to 4 sets of 10. You will not normally feel like you’ve exhausted your abs because these kinds of exercises rarely generate lactic acid to the same degree as a set of 20 crunches, but lactic acid is not an indication of muscular stimulation.

You’ll notice your work as soon as you step on the treadmill for your sprint session, and then days letter once your midsection has firmed. Once on the treadmill, warm up for 5 minutes with a moderate jog, and then either transition into the interval training I’ve outlined in Why Interval Training Needs to be a Part of Your Flat Abs Workout Plans or simply resolve yourself to 3 to 5 one minute sprints. By the end of the minute you should be close to failure, and you can rest 2 to 3 minutes between sprints by walking at a decent pace.

If added to your flat abs workout plans this abs workout done once or twice a week will turn your flat abs into rippling ones. It’s important to remember however that too much exercise is just as bad as too little. Your abs need time to recover and grow stronger, and any abs workout that is done intensely, should be done infrequently, once or twice a week max. A less intense abs workout can be performed three or four days a week, but in my opinion is less effective.

In keeping with the 80-20 rule, the most meaningful shift in our diets will come from controlling our intake of high glycemic carbohydrates and avoiding trans and hydrogenated fats. These carbs are easily recognizable because they taste great and are white. They include pastas, white breads, cookies, white rice, and potatoes, etc. We love eating these foods because the simple sugars that comprise them give us an immediate insulin surge and energy boost, which hours later results in an energy crash. Insulin tells our bodies to retain body fat.

The good carbs are known to all and come in the form of fruits, vegetables, and whole grains. These carbs take our bodies longer to break down and release energy at a slower pace, allowing our bodies to draw from fat stores for energy rather than flooding our bodies with the high concentration of energy and simple sugars from breads and pastas. You can change your diet to consist of mainly fruits, veggies, and lean meats, eat as much and as often as you want, and still find your body shedding weight and nearing your flat abs goals.

The quality of food we put in our bodies is so much more meaningful than the quantity. You can feel like you’re starving yourself, but if you’re eating the wrong kinds of food when you do it, your body will store it as fat. On the other hand, when eating a healthy diet of natural foods you can eat more and more often and still burn fat. The main reason being that fruits and vegetables, while rich in vitamins and minerals, are not calorie dense. It’s very hard to meet your caloric needs from a diet of only vegetables, and when you don’t consume adequate calories to meet your metabolic needs, your body will take the energy deficit from the only place it can…your body fat.

Flat abs is the inevitable outcome of returning to a natural food diet. Our bodies have evolved over millennia on food from the land, not processed foods with added sugars and flavors. Returning to a natural diet puts our hormones in balance and allows our bodies to function as they’re meant to…efficiently.

Protein is the last macronutrient we have yet to discuss, but its rarely an issue for those living in western and developed countries. Meats are commonplace and easy to come by, and as long as you try to consume some two to three meals a day you’ll be fine. Notice here I’m not discussing macronutrient quantity per meal. I’m doing that intentionally because I honestly believe it’s insignificant. When eating natural foods our bodies don’t need the caloric precision they need when we eat garbage because our hormonal response to healthy eating is a properly functioning and efficient body. It isn’t as sensitive to calorie fluctuations and in fact benefits from them.

This brings me to my last dietary recommendation, calorie shifting. This is where I give you a break. I know for most that a diet of natural foods sounds bland. But it doesn’t need to be. You can have a pretty diverse selection of great tasting and healthy foods if you dive in and make the lifestyle change. But nevertheless it may not serve to replace the psychological comfort of junk food. So here’s the catch, when you make the dietary changes above and are realizing gains in your flat abs battle, you can introduce a tactic known as calorie shifting.

A common problem with dieting is that in the beginning our bodies make up the caloric deficiency with body fat. But after some time our metabolism will acclimate to our new level of calorie consumption and downregulate. This means our metabolism will become lower to account for lower calories consumed. This is not good, as it means you’ll stop burning fat for energy. Most people come to the conclusion that they need to reduce there diet further and head down that path of starvation and long term metabolic destruction. What can we do about this? We can eat!! One day a week you can binge on absolutely anything.

Feel free to go out of your way to eat everything you love, ice cream, chips, chocolate, fudge, snickers. And don’t eat just some, eat till you feel sick. This has two great benefits. The first is it keeps our metabolism high by forcing it to deal with a massive surge of calories. This will allow you to burn fat consistently for months on end because when you hit your diet again the following six days your reduction in calories will be registered as a caloric deficit do to your consistently high metabolism. This deficit will continue to be met by burning belly fat for energy.

The second benefit is psychological. It’s hard to diet for the long term. Our minds crave those foods that make us feel guilty. Allowing ourselves that one day a week to binge is great for our mental health in that we don’t feel like we’re being deprived or sacrificing simple pleasures. It also makes us feel a little sick to our stomachs, and that will make it hard to think about or even look at comfort foods for days following the binge, removing all temptation of a little taste of chocolate. Who knew that binging would become your secret dietary weapon in the battle for flat abs.

The abdominals, even in well developed athletes are not big protrusive muscles. When they grow, they tend to widen more so than stick out. It’s the layer of belly fat covering these muscles that we really need to worry about if getting flat abs is our goal. But we’ve discussed this already and this is enough review. Let’s assume you’re watching your diet and are including resistance training and interval training in your flat abs workout plans already.

Then it’s only a matter of time before a little bit of extra abs training will make a difference in our midsection. Abdominal exercises should not be done compulsively or too frequently. Remember, they are muscles. And muscles all respond the same way to exercise. Intense exercise stimulates growth and requires rest in order to rebuild muscle and recover from your workout. So the principle of progressive overload applies to our abs as much as the rest of our body.

This means that in order to make gains in abdominal strength, we must increase the intensity of the exercise. If we increase the intensity, we must also DECREASE our frequency of training. I usually don’t train my abs more than twice a weak, and sometimes once or less. You see, the abs are stabilizing muscles, and so if you follow the interval and resistance training recommendations I’ve given, your abs are getting worked with nearly all your other training, and you’re well on your way to flat abs.

That said, if and when you do train your abs, there are some exercises that are more efficient than others, meaning more intense per time allotted. I’ll list some of those here, from beginner to intermediate levels:

Beginner
Crunches (done slowly with a 2 second pause at the crunched position)
Reclining Knee Crunches (lean back while sitting on a bench, support yourself with your hands and with your legs straight out pull your knees into a crunch.
Do 3 sets of 15 to 20 repetitions. Perform these 1 to 3 days a week, either after your resistance training or before your interval training. If all you’re looking for is flat abs, these abdominal exercises done once per week are sufficient. The following exercises are for flat abs and beyond. Warning, performing the following may result in a six pack.

Intermediate
Plank (from a pushup position, but support yourself with your forearms rather than your hands. Squeeze your abs and keep your whole body tight)
V-sits (start with body totally flat and hands extended behind head. Then curl whole body so hands touch feet with legs and arms straight.)
Plank on an exercise ball (Do the same plank as above, but elevate your feet and support yourself with your forearms on an exercise ball)
Perform the Plank for 1 minute at a time, rest for one minute and repeat 1 or 2 more times. The V-sits can be done in three sets of 10 to 20 repetitions. These exercises should be performed no more than 2 times per week.

Advanced
Hanging Knee Raises (hold onto a pull-up bar and curl your knees to your chest)
Hanging Straight Leg Raises
Perform three to five sets of ten repetitions. This should be done no more than two times per week, but one time should be sufficient for almost anybody.

So there you have it, beginning to advanced abdominal exercises guaranteed to strengthen the abs and bring the sexy. Keep in mind however that while these are great for bringing out definition and toning the midsection, they should be seen only as a supplement to diet, which is the leading cause of flat abs.

Traditional cardiovascular exercises like jogging, biking, and rowing at moderate speeds were considered the optimal ways to lose belly fat. The reason? Doing stuff for a long time burns more calories than not. Pretty simple. And most of us are aware that people that tend to do long cardio sessions on a regular basis tend to have flat abs. Why then would I recommend your workout plans take a different format that this? Because having flat abs and getting flat abs quickly are not the same thing.

First of all, it requires a great deal of strength and fitness to carry ones body at a moderate speed for 40 minutes to an hour without stopping. Most of us could not dream of this without considerable resistance training for strength and working up to that duration over several months. Fortunately for those of us who would want fast results and get bored with doing the same thing for an hour, long cardio sessions are not the quickest path to flat abs.

Interval training blows traditional cardio workouts out of the water when it comes to fat loss. Most of us know that if we walk quickly for an hour we burn around same amount of calories as if jog at twice the speed for a half an hour. So we try to take the easy way out and go the low impact route. What they don’t tell you is that calories burned while training isn’t the whole story. It is possible, and indeed probable with interval training, to burn fat around the clock from a 20 minute session rather than simply to burn calories while at the gym. This should excite those whose workout plans aim to produce flat abs in the shortest amount of time and with as little time training as possible.

Interval training is a combination of moderate and intense cardiovascular training within the same session. If running, a typical interval session may begin with a 5 minute warm up, followed by 3 to 5 sets of a 1 minute sprint (a speed you can sustain for only a minute to a minute and a half) 2 minute jog combo, and finally a cool down of 5 minutes or so. If you’re doing 3 sets of the interval segment, this workout takes less than 20 minutes. But this is an intense 20 minutes, and much harder than jogging for 40 minutes to an hour at moderate speeds; at least on the body if not the mind.

The real benefit of including interval training in your workout plans is that it puts your body in a fat burning state long after you’ve finished training, at times up to 48 hours after training. And assuming you have a healthy heart, interval training will serve to make it stronger, as well as tone the legs, midsection, and other locations with saggy skin. Clearly a fat burning program that works around the clock is more conducive to getting flat abs than 50 minutes of fat burning at the gym.

Our bodies will, after some time, adapt to out cardio training, just as it will to resistance training. The only way to avoid adapting, and so plateauing, is to increase the intensity or structure of the workout. Interval training allows us to structure and restructure our workout plans frequently in order to keep our bodies from adapting to workouts. This keeps the body growing, adapting, and drawing on stored body fat to meet inconsistent energy requirements.

So not only is interval training effective, it’s also efficient. Three to four sessions a week will result in flat abs in no time. It can be done by jogging outdoors, on an elliptical, circuit training with moderate weights, a bicycle, or kickboxing, so there is no good excuse not to include it in your flat abs workout plans.

So what do flat abs workout plans need to include exactly? There are two indispensable components of training for flat abs. The first is resistance training for muscle development and increased metabolic rate. And the second is interval training, which will be the key component in fat loss, as well as an over all metabolic supercharge. So what kinds of exercises are best for resistance training?

The best kinds of exercises for all around fitness, and for flat abs in particular, are total body compound movements. In fact, there are probably only 5 essential lifts that take care of more than 80 or 90 percent of your resistance training needs. These 5 will stimulate virtually every major muscle group, as well as most stabilizing muscles. The easiest way to conceive of them is by understanding what our bodies are designed to do.

Our chests, arms, and back, are designed to push and pull respectively. Our legs are designed to squat and stand, and our shoulders are designed to lift our arms over our heads. The 5 major lifts work every muscle involved in these basic movements. The first lift is the good old fashioned bench press… or pushups for someone with less strength. For the back one can choose either pull-ups or bent over rows. The arms are worked in both of these movements, as the triceps support the pushing movement, and the biceps support the pulling movement.

For the legs we use the squat. This can be done with bodyweight or a bar bell. Your body should drop so that your thighs are parallel with the floor. This exercise works every major muscle group in the legs. This exercise is supplemented with the dead lift, a total body lift which provides the simple task of picking heavy things up off the floor safely. This exercise works the hamstrings and quads, the lower, middle, and upper back, and the traps.

And the last lift is the shoulder or military press. Grab a barbell and starting at your collarbone, push the bar straight overhead. These 5 exercises, if done in sets of 3, 8 to 12 repetitions, are enough for anyone to stimulate muscle growth as well as set the path for flat abs. At more advanced levels these exercises should be combined into supersets, where two exercises are performed back to back before a 1 minute rest is taken.

Notice here that I don’t have any abdominal exercises. That is because they are rather unnecessary in producing flat abs. Low body fat is 95% of the flat abs game. And if you reach a low enough body fat, abdominal exercises may help you to build a little shape, but they will not help you flatten the midsection. In the next post we’ll look at the other component of our flat abs workout plans, interval training.