5 Reasons Your Abs Aren’t Growing

After 1000′s of crunches and seven brutally intense ab workouts per week, you’d think that it would all add up to beautiful sculpted abs right? Wrong, 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. So 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.

Ab development tends to be MUCH more challenging; bordering on excruciating. That’s why you don’t see six packs endlessly populating the earth. The truth is most people approach ab training completely wrong and spend their time focusing on things that aren’t effective. Here are some reasons that you might not be able to see results in your abs:

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. It doesn't matter 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. Try 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.

4. You Only Do Crunches and Sit-Ups

Crunches and sit-ups primarily work the top of the rectus abdominus, aka the 6 pack muscles. Even though building up the top is an incredibly important part of a stellar midsection, relying ONLY on sit-ups and crunches will cause the obliques, transverse abdominus, and lower abs to lag behind.

Think of the transverse abdominus as a belt that runs around the waist and sucks everything in tight. Exercises like the plank can help build up the transverse and make the entire torso more compact. The obliques run diagonally along the side of the torso into the pelvis, which forms the V-cut that everyone craves so much.

The key — diversify, diversify, diversify! Incorporating bicycle crunches, hanging leg raises, and a variety of other ab exercises into your routine can help chisel out all parts of the core region, beyond just the rectus.

5. You Don’t Increase the Difficulty

Your abs won’t grow past beginner levels unless you force them to. Muscles grow based on the principle of progressive resistance, meaning that you need to increase the weight lifted, the amount of resistance, or the difficulty of the exercise if you want to see any additional growth or progress.

If you want massive legs, you need to gradually increase the amount of weight squatted — ab development works the same way. When it comes to developing core musculature, crunches and sit-ups are extremely basic and provide minimal stimulation. Instead of simply doing higher reps of something basic (ab exercises should stay between 12-20 reps per set), upgrade it by adding a heavier dumbbell/weight plate/medicine ball, or permanently shift to more advanced exercises.

For example, try crunches with a dumbbell on your chest, cable crunches, sit-ups on a decline bench, or the Lower Abs Trifecta. Adding a weight or more difficult angle can help make basic exercises significantly more difficult and kickstart brand new abdominal growth.

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