These Proven Tips will get you 6-pack abs and a flat stomach fast. Most People are wasting their time looking for six-pack diet & workout plans while ignoring abdominal muscle growth. Find out how to bulk up your abs so they can pop out and show. And get all your questions answered about how long it'll take to get abs as well as what body fat percentage you have to be to see your abs. The answers contradict much of the common mainstream information.
Defined abs will make you look significantly more fit while increasing confidence, and attractiveness. Having a strong core will also improve your posture, prevent lower back pain, and it can help increase your overall athleticism since the core is what connects your upper and lower body together. Unfortunately, many people are wasting time on things that'll never get their abs to show, so today I want to give you guys 10 steps that you can follow to guarantee that you get the best abdominal muscle growth and definition as soon as possible
And the first obvious step that we cannot ignore is that you have to make Sure that You Are Lean Enough. Unless you have a low enough body fat, you’ll never see your abs, and you especially won't see them in a well-defined way. That’s why one of the primary goals that you should have if you want well-defined abs is to get lean. Some people tend to store more of their fat around their midsection, which means they need to maintain an overall leaner body composition to see their abs compared to someone that doesn’t store as much fat specifically around their midsection. While there are overall rules of thumb guidelines that men need to be around 12% body fat, and women need to be around 19 percent body fat to see nice abs, this will fluctuate quite a bit from person to person.
This also does have to do with another thing I recommend you do, which is to add more muscle to your abs so that they pop out more. You would do that by training Your Abs With Progressive Overload. Just like any other muscle, if you want it to grow, you have to train the muscle in a way that exposes that muscle or muscle group to more challenging stimuli over time. So an example is, if you could do a particular ab exercise for 12 reps in your last workout, you could try to do 13 reps during your next session. Or you could do the same 12 reps but make it more challenging with some extra weight. Most people already train their abs with high reps.
With that said training higher rep ab training shouldn't be ignored or skipped over. Both high reps with low weight and low reps with heavy weight should be incorporated into your routine. It's just that usually people forget to do the heavy-weight sets with abs rather than the high-rep sets with abs. It's important to do both high reps and low reps because data indicates that the abs have a balanced profile of around 55 to 58% slow-twitch fibers and the rest in fast-twitch fibers. Fast twitch fibers are known to respond better to higher intensity, higher weight loads, and lower rep counts. Meanwhile, slow twitch responds better to higher reps with a lower weight. So, you want to do both low- and high-rep sets for optimal growth. One of the best ways to do this is to save the higher rep bodyweight sets for the end of your workout after you've already done all your heavy weighted exercises like weighted declined situps, weighted crunches, and weighted pulse-ups. Or alternatively, you can do high and low rep sets together with supersets. Utilizing this superset strategy you would do a high rep set with no weight right after every low rep set with heavy weight. An example would be to perform weighted declined situps for 10 reps and then immediately perform 20 to 40 reps of jackknifes.
You should also specifically focus on Ab Isolation Exercises Instead of General Compound Movements. Lots of people claim that doing compound exercises like squats, deadlifts, and barbell overhead presses are enough to develop flawless abs. But is that true? Well, if you’re still in the beginner phase of your fitness journey you likely can build some AB muscle by doing these compound lifts but that won't be the case anymore once you've adapted to those exercises and you're past that beginner point this is due to the fact that most ab exercises don't activate the ABS effectively since your lumbar spine doesn't Flex or rotate during those movements.
we have a study that looked at muscle activity levels during many different exercises including doing the back squat with a very heavy weight for only three reps surprisingly researchers found that AB muscle activation was so low it didn't even reach 20 percent of Maximum voluntary contraction the straight leg sit-up on the other hand activated the external obliques and rectus abdominis by around 40 percent that's more than double the activation produced by a very heavy set of squats on top of that another study found that during the clean and jerk exercise core activity levels were also very low this is interesting because the clean and jerk includes the movement patterns of a squat deadlift and overhead press all in one which is why it's considered by many as an effective AB building exercise but still it didn't train the ABS very effectively so what you want to do instead is focus on AB isolation exercises and I'll give you the best exercises for that in just a minute.
But first you have to understand why static exercises don't work very well for developing your rectus abdominis or obliques this is exactly why you shouldn't rely on AB specific static exercises like planks for example one of the reasons planks aren't so great is that the movement is too easy to begin with for most people unless you're currently out of shape you can likely hold the plank for at least a minute or two without adding weight so it's not very effective in regard to muscle growth for the rectus abdominis and the obliques because the amount of tension overload is too low there are of course ways in which you can increase the difficulty of a plank one is by doing a long lever posterior pelvic tilt Plank and research has found that this movement resulted in over a hundred percent activation relative to maximum voluntary contraction for the upper and lower abs and the obliques you can also alternatively place a weight across your lower back and hips to increase tension overload as well.
However even though these modifications can cause a significant increase in muscle activation I still wouldn't rely on the plan blank too much for abdominal muscle growth because it remains a static ab exercise which is not the best way to build muscle an equivalent of the plank would be an isometric exercise where you stack your hands together and create an isometric contraction pushing down with one hand and pushing up with the other to train your biceps on one side and your triceps on the other side instead you want to focus on Dynamic ab exercises these are better for muscle growth because both The Eccentric or the lowering phase and the concentric or the lifting phase both of these offer unique benefits that you don't get from static or isometric movements for example Research indicates you can produce two times more force during eccentric contractions and 50 percent more force during concentric contractions when compared to isometric contractions.
That means Dynamic exercises allow you to overload your muscles to a greater extent leading to a more potent muscle growth stimulus on top of that The Eccentric and the concentric phases activate different anabolic cell signaling patterns that don't get fully stimulated with isometrics so if you want to build your abs focus on Dynamic movements that'll help you optimize
muscle growth that doesn't mean isometric core exercises like the plant can't be beneficial for their own reasons they do have their benefits for example they may reduce the risk of lower back pain or they may strengthen deeper stabilize your muscles and muscles like the transverse abdominis but if you want to optimize AB development specifically to visually enhance the appearance of your abs focus on Dynamic exercises.
This is why you also want to primarily focus on training your rectus abdominis and many people get this part wrong if you look at the ab development for most people the most underdeveloped part of their abs is generally the rectus abdominis also known as the six-pack muscle this doesn't mean that you should ignore the rest of your course such as your obliques but if you want to shape perfect looking ABS your rectus abdominis should be the main focus and there are two types of movements that you need to do to develop your rectus abdominis.
The first one is a crunch type of movement examples are regular crunches cable crunches decline sit-ups bicycle sit-ups and other similar exercises even though the rectus abdominis has one muscle that connects from your upper abs all the way to your lower abs crunching and sit-up movements emphasize the upper part of your rectus abdominis.
The other type of movement that you should be doing is leg raise variations examples include hanging and lying leg raises pulse-ups V sit-ups and exercises like those that emphasize the lower part of your rectus abdominis of course keep in mind that you're not going to magically spot reduce belly fat even if you're doing the best ab exercises remember one of the number one things that determine how good your abs look is how lean you are research shows that you cannot get rid of the belly fat just by doing ab exercises in fact in one study scientists had participants doing a whopping four hours of ab training weekly for six weeks and after all their hard work their ab exercises didn't lead to belly fat loss or fat loss in general so if you want to get nice abs and you have a layer of body fat covering those abs don't rely on doing endless amounts of crunches and sit-ups instead you need to maintain a calorie deficit until you you shed enough fat from your midsection to see them.
The rules are pretty straightforward but there is a catch that you have to keep in mind when creating your calorie deficit so you probably already know that if you want to gain weight you have to consume more calories than you burn and if you want to lose fat you have to consume fewer calories than you burn but what most people forget is that you'll likely have to keep readjusting how many calories you eat per day multiple times throughout this process the reason is that caloric expenditure varies throughout your fat loss Journey due to factors like metabolic adaptation so to ensure that you're actually maintaining a calorie deficit you should measure your weight on a scale daily after waking up it's important you do this at the same time each day you write that number down and at the end of the week you should add up all the daily numbers and divide that total by seven this will give you a weekly average if you're losing at least 0.5 percent of body weight per week keep up with your current calorie intake but if you're not losing at least 0.5 percent of your body weight per week drop your daily energy intake by 200 calories.
Well so as you're reducing those calories make sure that you're still getting enough protein aim to get at least 0.72 grams of protein per pound of body weight per day so if you weigh 180 pounds that means you would consume at least 130 grams of protein per day not only will that help you maintain muscle mass but it'll also help you maintain a calorie deficit because protein is the most satiating macronutrient this is why it's common to see results like what we saw in a 12-week study where participants with a high body fat percentage followed either a high protein diet or a standard protein diet those on the high protein diet lost an additional three pounds of body fat and around one extra inch off of their waste.