Hello and Welcome! :)

Before anything else, a little explanation:

What's The Deal

6 STEPS + 6 WEEKS = 6 PACK!" claims "The Ultimate Abs Plan" article by Mike Tench in the Sept '09 issue of FHM Bionic.

Yeah, right. Right?

What the Heck, Let's Test It!

We expect to be much fitter by the end of the 6 weeks, but we highly doubt we'll end up looking like the chiselled dude in the picture. Which is what the magazine wants you to think.

To make our testing as accurate and fair as possible, we're going to follow all the steps outlined in the article as much as closely as two regular people can.

Who We Are

Arivind Abraham: 26, average guy, moderately fit. Works from home and tries to jog/cycle 3-4 times a week. Lamenting loss of muscle tone after quitting the gym due to THE ECONOMY.

Samantha Tan: 24, female, professional dancer and former gymnast so quite fit. Typically body-conscious woman but also HUGE foodie and therefore in a perpetual dilemma.

The Article

Step 1- "20 seconds on, 10 seconds off"... a timer is in order then. We bought a cheap Casio to use as a stopwatch (£8.87 on Amazon), and will be using our local park as a running track. No expensive gym needed here.

The article has given us no indication as to how many days we should do this- the average person is advised to exercise 3 days a week whilst world-class athletes train almost daily, so the reasonable happy medium we've decided on is 5 days a week.

Step 2- Got it. Will do as told.

Lucky for us we love salmon sashimi :) We'll be recording everything we eat in a daily food diary for the whole of the 6 weeks, and we promise to be honest.

Had NO clue what this weird thingamajig was supposed to do until we watched this:

Looks like a bitch to use but we ordered the exact one shown in the article anyway (£6.99 on Amazon). Pain for pleasure ;P

£36 to cheat?! We're poor and can stomach green tea, so we'll have 3-4 cups daily like step 2 advises to do rather than popping pills.

Step 6- Again no indication of frequency was given, so like the running we'll be doing these 5 times a week. Purchased a 65cm Swiss Ball with pump (£15.94 including postage from eBay), and the only change we'll be making since we don't own a Captain's Chair is to perform Exercise 2 like this:

In addition, Arivind will be doing weight training for his arms and chest which may result in him burning a few more calories, but shouldn't dramatically impact his abs per se.

Samantha won't be doing anything extra with weights lest she ends up looking like this:

We'll be blogging daily once we kick off (which is when the equipment we've ordered arrives), rounded up by a video blog at the end of each week. If you Twitter, follow us on @riptjoint.

Thanks for reading and wish us luck as we embark on our little fitness experiment! :)