Fitness: The Three Reason Why Your Abs Are Not Growing or Showing?

After 1000′s of crunches and seven brutally intense ab workouts per week, you’d think that it would all add up to that one coveted, magic number — 6.

It’s sad and discouraging when someone puts in a TON of effort to sculpt a rock-solid, well-defined set of six pack abs, yet the results are nowhere to be found. It can be unbelievably deflating. What’s an innocent, ab-happy person supposed to do?

One of the most redeeming things about fitness, in general, is that there’s typically a direct correlation between time, effort, and results. It’s a simple equation if you do cardio 45 minutes per day, 6 days per week, you will lose a lot of weight. Given that you do the right exercises, if you follow a comprehensive chest routine and increase the amount that you’re pressing over successive workouts, your chest will grow. It’s just the way exercise and training works.

I suppose that’s why you don’t see six packs endlessly populating the earth. And the truth is — it’s because most people approach ab training completely wrong and spend their time focusing on things that aren’t effective.

Getting a phenomenal set of abs requires smart training, a LEAN, clean diet, and minimal equipment…not ab workouts 7 days per week, ridiculous ab machines, or crunch, after crunch, after crunch.

1. You Can’t See Them:

This might seem brutally obvious, but at the core (no pun intended) the most important  and fundamental piece of ab development is being able to see them. Bombshell. I don’t care if you can do the ‘Plunging, Deep V, Lower Abs Workout‘ 18 times over. If your body fat % isn’t low enough no one will be able to see what you’re packing underneath. For men, body fat should be sub-10%; for women, it should be sub-18% for the ab muscles to really pop.

If you want to get your body fat down to 6-pack levels, make sure to incorporate a solid dose of high-intensity cardio and emphasize a healthy, LEAN diet.

2. You Try to Crunch Away the Fat:

Drill it into your cranium. There’s NO such thing as spot reduction.

You can’t crunch off the fat covering the lower section of your abs nothing about our physiology supports this misconception. The only way to strip the fat from your abs is by gradually burning it off from your entire body through cardio, diet, and weight-training. Unfortunately, the fat covering the abs is usually the last to go and the first to come back, which makes getting/keeping abs all the more difficult.

Stay persistent with a clean diet, resistance training, and cardio regimen and you’ll be able to maintain low body fat permanently. Abs require a lifestyle shift and a TON of discipline, not a quick fix.

3. You Workout Your Abs Every Day:

Give your core a rest. STOP training your abs every day, or even every other day.

Like the biceps, chest, shoulders, legs, etc., the ab muscles need time to rest, recover, and rebuild in order to grow. Would you do biceps curls, bench press, or squat 7x per week to build bulging biceps, a hulking chest, or massive thighs? Never. I recommend doing abs once every 3 days. That’s 2-3x per week. Not only will this allow your abs to actually recover and grow, but it’ll free up significant time to funnel into more intense, more transformative training (e.g. compound weight-lifting and cardio).

Most of your bandwidth in the gym should be spent divided across the major muscle groups (legs, chest, shoulders, back) and cardio; and then accessorized with targeted abs work. Don’t sacrifice that in pursuit of a six pack  not only do compound lifts like squats, deadlifts, bent-over barbell rows, clean & presses, and dumbbell swings shred major calories/body fat and stimulate muscle growth, they also work the core as hard  if not harder than direct ab exercises.

Big lifts are the sledgehammer; isolated ab exercises are the scalpel. Leverage both and reap the rewards.