As you might know I spend most of my time in Venice or in Santa Monica at the beach. Of course I’m always shirtless and I often get spoken by people who wants to know how I got my sixpack. I really enjoy their faces when I tell them that I do 450 sit-ups every day and all I eat is chicken and vegetables… 🙂

But let’s be serious now.

Everyone does have abdominals, but you can’t see them on most people simply because a layer of fat covers them. In other words, all you need to have is a low body fat percentage. On the one hand there are people with sixpacks who don’t even train on abs and on the other hand people with crazy core strength but without any visible abdominal muscles.

I personally train abs maybe once every other week in a circuit training in which I do 4-5 different exercises without rest in between. You have to be aware that this is not the only time I work on core strength. Every time I work on the rings or on the parallel bars the core is involved in pretty much all the movements like ring muscle up, handstand press, levers or even just swinging. To determine how strong your core is, you could hang on a pullup bar and try to hold the L-sit position as long as you can.  Make sure that your legs are fully stretched out without a bend in your knees. I’m able to hold it for around 50 seconds, so I’m for sure not the man with strongest core but I’d say everything above  30 seconds is good.

Let’s come to my diet now. Because of traveling there is simply no structure in my eat habit. I eat different things to different times. One thing I know for sure: I don’t live from vegetables and chicken! I eat a lot and not only healthy food. I try to keep the fat intake as low as possible and get most of my calories from carbohydrates. I don’t count calories but I’m sure I eat at least 3’000 calories a day. This amount might seems very high for some of you, but you have to bear in mind that I also burn a lot with exercising. I’ve been losing some pounds the last weeks, that’s why I try to eat as much as I can (I have literallity visited three different all-you-can-eat-buffets this week and I always left the restaurants with stomachache). I’d never dare to eat like that back in Switzerland when I work all day in the office, but because I’m pretty active here in the States I think I just need all the calories to recover well from the workouts.

I will probably write another blog about how I stay fit while traveling but I hope this blog helps to clear things up a bit. Let me know if you have questions about my workout or even about my diet.

– Tinu

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