We're all interested in fitness, or at least in maintaining the idea that we might start getting fit any day now; man, get off our back . As such, there are tons and tons of advice out there on how to tone your body into a veritable machine made of health and sexiness. And a ton of said advice is outright bullshit .

5 Six-Pack Abs Are the Pinnacle of Fitness

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Give anyone a pencil and ask them to draw what a perfect male abdomen looks like, and they'll all draw it the same: bulging, perfectly visible "six-pack" abs -- just like every action star and pro athlete (well, other than offensive linemen and sumo wrestlers). It makes every bit of sense to use the elusive six-pack as a marker for demigod-level health -- after all, it shows you've finally gotten rid of every last bit of that gut flab and replaced it with beautiful, lean muscle.

See, this is what a male body is supposed to look like. In a perfect world, shirts would be illegal, baby.

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And self-washing.

But Actually ...

As awesome as a stomach you can open beer bottles with may seem, six-pack abs mean precisely jack shit when it comes to health. In fact, they can be downright hazardous.

Many people think that sculpted abs are acquired with years of painstaking situp sessions (which are actually dangerous). In reality, a huge part of the trick is to get rid of your body fat until your abdominal muscles stick out from the dried-up wreckage like tombstones of the hamburgers of yesteryear. The problem is that your body doesn't exactly hate fat. In fact, it fucking loves and needs the stuff, and if it can't get its fix, it'll start messing with you. Yes, we're saying a six-pack can be less healthy than your average cushion for the pushin', and we've got the science to back us up.

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Pictured: A sad, sickly man.

The healthy range for a 20- to 40-year-old man's body fat is between 8 to 19 percent. Unfortunately, the majority of guys need to dip below that 8-percent mark to actually get that washboard stomach they've always wanted, which means they enter a situation where their body actually has too little fat. Not only is this condition extremely difficult to attain and maintain, but trying too hard can break your body pretty easily and terrifyingly. If you don't know what you're doing and/or forget to pay a shitload of attention to your every step, the ailments your fat-reducing ab quest might start throwing at you include (but are by no means limited to): a messed-up immune system, a wide and storied amount of genital problems, issues with your heart and nervous system, shrinkage of internal organs, and, of course, death.