Million Dollar Abs Take Work
For anyone embarking on a fitness journey, the desire for visible abs is often a major goal. I will admit that it’s certainly a significant milestone in one’s fitness trajectory. It’s one of the key indicators of a dedicated approach to fitness and a sign of discipline.
If you’ve been working out for a while, and are starting to think about how to train your abs, you’ll probably turn to the internet for advice. And when you do, the same tired old quotes will likely pop up:
- “Abs are made in the kitchen.”
- “Crunches are useless.”
While these statements contain a grain of truth, they ultimately promote the idea that training your abs is largely pointless, suggesting you’ll never achieve the desired results without a proper calorie deficit. This idea, while technically correct, misleads and demotivates a lot of people.
As a result, many beginners feel disheartened, and they either skip ab training from their weekly program altogether, or they only train them sporadically. And this is where we start to go off track. It’s the training aspect that I want to focus on, because, unlike most other muscle groups, abs are given the least attention and the most neglected part of many people’s fitness routine.
Think about it. When you train major muscles, like the biceps or triceps, you see an almost instant “pump”. This is really gratifying and motivates you to continue to train these areas, so they grow larger and stronger. However, since people believe that abs have a “diet barrier”, they don’t often feel that same gratification, and many people completely skip training them, or train them ineffectively.
To be completely honest, I was once one of those people. I rarely trained my abs because I believed that I should only focus on them when I was in a calorie deficit. I thought it was a waste of time to train them until I’d lost enough weight.
After months of eating clean, my body fat levels had started to drop. But guess what? My abs didn’t look as good as I had imagined, or at least not as defined as I had hoped. The reason for this is now very obvious, right? I hadn’t been training them effectively, or regularly, to enable them to grow in the first place.
I mistakenly believed that it was some magical process where only a calorie deficit and endless crunches would be the magic fix. Well, I couldn’t have been more wrong. The truth is, that abs, like any other muscle group, need proper resistance training with progressive overload. That’s the only way a muscle can undergo the process of damage and repair (through rest and diet), which is what promotes growth and strength.
Lowering your body fat is absolutely essential for visible abs this is BY FAR the most important part, but the point of this article is to emphasize the importance of the training part. The misconception of “Abs are made in the Kitchen” often distracts people from the other half of the equation, which is working out, and training your abs.
How to Integrate Serious Ab Training Into Your Workout Routine (Regardless of Diet)
I currently weigh around 68kg, and I try to maintain my weight within a small range. Sometimes, I bulk up a little, and other times, I cut some fat. This has taught me that diet is dynamic, and shouldn’t be a reason to skip abs training.
Like any other muscle group, I now train my abs twice a week, and sometimes even more (between 2 and 4 times a week) to make up for the time that I wasted ignoring them. The point is that training abs is now a non-negotiable part of my overall routine.
But does that mean that you should be following one of those 10-minute ab routines every single day? Not at all. That’s also a popular misconception that can lead to ineffective workouts. As a beginner, it’s incredibly difficult to maintain proper form during bodyweight ab workouts, and it’s even harder to create the necessary workout volume to see real results.
Think of crunches as the equivalent to push-ups for growing your chest. If you were serious about growing your chest muscles, would you only stick to push-ups forever? Probably not, right? You’d likely start bench pressing, and you’d progressively overload that movement over time to keep pushing your body to grow. That’s how progress is made, and that’s how muscle growth happens.
So, what is the “bench press” equivalent for effective abs training? That is, what exercises should you be focusing on if you’re serious about ab growth?
There are many different types of exercises that can be used to target your upper abs, lower abs, and obliques. While oblique training is a good addition to your ab workout routine, for beginners, your main goal should be to hit both your upper and lower abs effectively. Here are my two key ab exercises:
- Cable Crunches:
- This exercise directly targets your upper abs, and it’s an exercise that’s easy to progressively overload, making it ideal for building size.
- It is a highly effective exercise. If you are consistent, you’ll start to see results in the first few months.
- Using the cable machine provides constant tension, helping to maximize muscle activation during the exercise.
- Hanging Leg Raises:
- This powerful exercise targets your lower abs, and helps you to get that much sought-after “V-taper” shape.
- As a beginner, it may be difficult to avoid swinging at the beginning, but you can always perform this exercise with back support as you gain more strength and stability.
- You can progressively overload the exercise by chaining weight plates to yourself, or holding a dumbbell between your feet as you get stronger.
And that’s it. These are the only two main ab exercises you really need to focus on if your goals are definition and growth. Everything else is just extra. There’s no need to overcomplicate your ab training routine. I do a LOT of other routines but nothing targets my core more than this mainly because of the ability to progressively overload and add weight.
A Quick Reality Check
However… before you start working out your abs, read this. If you’re currently sitting at around 35% body fat, achieving highly visible abs is very rare. You’ll probably be better off focusing on lowering your overall body fat, and adding muscle mass, before worrying about fine-tuning your abs definition. In that case, lowering your body fat should be your priority and do this through cardio and caloric deficit. Nothing makes me shake my head more than seeing someone far overweight sitting for an hour on the crunch machine at the gym thinking they can “crunch” their way to lower body fat. It’s a waste of time beacuse there are far more efficient ways to do it.
But if you’re already hovering around 15–20% body fat and are wondering whether you need to do a really hard cut in order to see visible abs, that is likely not the case. Just training them harder, using progressive overload, can make them protrude through your fat layer. You’ll start to see visible abs, and you can further define them by shredding fat to get even better results.
Remember that the muscle building process must come first, before you start to focus on shredding the fat and defining the muscles.
If your muscle-building foundation is solid, it will only take around 60–90 days to get “killer abs”. For that, you need a consistent approach and progressively overloaded exercises, designed to push your muscles to their limits.
The Key Takeaway
The point of this article is very simple, and very direct:
Never skip ab day!
They’re just as important as any other muscle group and should be treated as such. By incorporating resistance training with progressive overload, you can build abs that not only look great, but also contribute to overall core strength and stability.
So, don’t let that common myth “abs are made in the kitchen” misguide you into skipping ab training. Make sure to focus on your diet, but also focus on the ab exercises that will help you to build muscle and definition.
