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As many ab exercises as I know from prior knowledge, and being a fitness junkie myself, I decided to put all those aside and stick to the pure facts. Of course other elements like cardio and diet are major players in my schedule as well as the legitimate ab routines, in order to attain that summer tummy everybody wants! Although my magazine naturally will target much more women than men, all the exercises chosen are unisex (which is why I randomly selected women and men in my survey).

According to BodyBuilding.com, before any real ab's can show, the layer of fat covering them need to shed. Three to four times a week of running, jogging, stair master, jumping rope, or biking etc will do the trick. This is why I decided to make week one of my schedule very cardio oriented-with 6 days of interval cardio to prep the body.  Since we only have a limited time frame to get the best possible results for summer, I decided to include more cardio than usual. The other three weeks will have cardio incorporated 4 times a week to maintain, but much more physical ab work than week one. Interval cardio is something that I've been doing for a long time and have had great results with it. Not only does it strengthen the body's endurance but allows for high calorie burning which is hard to achieve by doing the basic run till you're too tired and need a break. Specifically, it's four to six challenges that are typically 60-90 seconds long but very intense followed by a rest period. Challenges get more and more intense as you continue. For example, running on level 8 on the treadmill for one minute straight with a 30 second walk period, followed another minute long sprint but on level 9, so on and so forth. Another major benefit I found through BodyBuilding's website was that, opposed to jogging where as soon as you stop your body is finished burning fat, interval cardio continues to burn fat for 2-4 hours post workout AND saves time!