It’s relatively easy to drop a few pounds, but it can be extremely difficult to get a six pack. You need a stronger focus, better knowledge, and this isn’t something you can get by luck. In this article we’ll be going over the most common reasons your efforts to get a six pack will fail and what to do about them.

Many are only looking for quick fixes. They don’t want to put in any real effort. Thinking like this leads to giving up at the first sign of resistance. The result you’re looking for must draw you enough to put in real effort or you’ll be bouncing from one diet to the next until you finally give up completely. Six pack abs mean you have a strong physique, but you need a matching mentality to get there.

You may think that you’ve been fed the wrong information about dieting as much of it seems to be conflicting. It’s seldom that sinister. It’s more common for the information to be incomplete, overwhelming, or just poorly blended.

Incomplete information usually relates to diets that have no exercise program attached to them. Without exercise you’ll likely lose muscle or get results very slowly.

The blending of information is more often a problem when you’re doing the experimenting yourself. You heard about a few different things and try to mix them all up. While it can work, you need to understand all of the principles that you’re mixing together completely in order to do this. Unless you have a lot of experience, it is better to avoid this.

Many have issues when they’re thrown too much information. By looking at all of the different takes on a subject, you’re looking to absorb too much. It can be overwhelming and make you want to give up on the spot because it’s just too much. Sticking with just basic ideas that everyone knows to work is better. There aren’t that many real approaches to losing weight when you look at the basics. Diet and exercise are always going to be a part of them unless you’re going the surgical route (which is a terrible idea for the goal of a six pack as you’ll be back to your old weight in no time without changing your habits).

In some cases, people have conflicting goals that cause problems. Trying to gain muscle while losing fat is an example of this. Muscle gain requires extra fuel, fat loss requires an absence thereof. You can try carbohydrate cycling with a specific match-up on your workouts, but it can be complicated. Just focus on fat loss to get your six pack and you’ll be better off. With a low body fat percentage, most people have great abs.

You need a personalized program for the best results. Your belief in the program is also critical. If you’ve tried other diets and programs that didn’t work for you, you’re likely ready to give up on the next one quickly as well. If you’re ready to drop it at any time, you’re not going to get an accurate view of whether or not the program works. When you put little effort into something, as you are likely to do with that mindset, you get little results out of it. You’re also likely to be obsessed with every single fluctuation on the scale. Body weight fluctuations a fair amount from day to day, so if you give up too soon, you won’t be able to get any statistically significant results to know if what you were doing was working or not.

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