If you’re a man and you live a typical Western lifestyle, you probably crave the abs that belong to movie stars. Guess what? That rippling chest can be yours too, if you want it bad enough! And the surprising thing isn’t really how easy it is to get there, it’s the fact that so few people try to get there in the first place. Believe it or not, we can boil it down to five easy tips to get you on the road to great abs. And from there, all you have to do is stay on it and you’ll most assuredly get there.

1 – Train, but don’t overwhelm your body’s recuperative abilities. One of the easiest mistakes for a beginner to make is to work on his abs all the time, every day. This won’t speed up the process, in fact it will hamper it. Your muscles grow by being broken down by exercise, and then rebuilt by your body afterwards. Without sufficient recovery time, you’ll only do yourself harm. After an intense ab-focused workout, give yourself a couple days to rest your abs, by working on some other body part.

2 – When you do train, give your body a well-rounded workout. It’s easy to just focus on your abs and ignore everything else. But those other parts of your body help stabilize you while you exercise! If you don’t tend to them, your abs will take longer to get to where you want them to be. Since you need to rest your abs periodically anyway, why not go over the rest of your body in the meantime?

3 – Keep hydrated, especially during workouts. Your body is mostly water, and that’s no exaggeration. If you don’t have water, your body won’t be able to feed nutrients into the proper areas rapidly. By keeping yourself fully refreshed with water during workouts, you keep your body at a peak where it can make full use of your exercises.

4 – Watch your food and drink intake. Your body can only be, in an overall sense, what you eat and drink. It can only make itself what you give it the building blocks for. If you’re drinking sodas and eating pizza, you’re giving your body the building blocks for fat and flab. Stick to water, natural fruit juices, vegetables, whole wheat breads, and other healthy things for regular meals.

5 – Finally, avoid excessive crunches for alternative ab-based exercises. This last tip may seem highly counterintuitive, but it’s true. Once you get past a certain comfortable minimum, large amounts of crunches will just strain your neck and back uncomfortably while doing relatively little for your abs. Don’t keep adding more and more crunches on, it won’t do much good.

Don’t give up! By following these tips you, too, can look like a dashing Hollywood actor. It doesn’t take a vast amount of time or willpower, either – just a little self-discipline and the desire to attain what you really want.