How to Properly Train Your Abs

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Sal De Stefano, Adam Schaefer, and Justin Andrews. You just found the most downloaded fitness health and entertainment podcast in history This is Minepump. All right, in today's episode, we're going gonna teach you three things you can do to get a six pack Six pack abs in four to six weeks. By the way, we have a core training program, a program designed to give you a six pack buildild those abs, give you hard obliques to make you look impressive in the midsection and it's fifty percent off. You can get the full program for twenty eight dollars and fifty cents. Go to no BS Six pack dot com That's noBS the number six P . com use the code six pack for fifty percent off. That's the number six and then pack again. That'll get you the price of twenty eight dollars and fifty cents. This episode is brought to you by. Crisp power. 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All right, real quick. if you love us like we love you, why not show up by rocking one of our shirts, hats, mugs or training gear over at mindpumpstore d. com I'm talking right now, hit pause, head on over to mypumpstore. comot That's it. enjoy the rest of the show. We're gonna to talk about six pack abs. We're gonna talk about the three things you can do to get a six pack fourour to six weeks man, this would be let's get to it. Easier helping people make a million dollars The statistics show that There are possible statistically there are more millionaires than people with six pc ads. That's wild when you think about that. Yeah. When you think about the difficulty of making a million dollars and think that like, you know, you feel like probably very you feel like very few people have that. justust showed you how fewer people have actual six pc. Well think about how many millionaires have a six pack I wonder what I want yeah, that's seem more rare. you u How do you think Did Be There's probably a lot of people that have had a six pack, but then they don't keep it. so How do they count that, right? Is it like at any given time, there's only a percentage. got to be muscular. It it can't just be like, you know, the skinny pack. Bingo skinny abs. No, I mean they all have abs skinny abs. That's where Iveen the most, probably? No, that's a good point because there's when you train wrong U, because let's say you're trying to get a six pack. and you're working out, right? If you train wrong, you don't build. People forget that the abs are muscles They they for some reason, we consider them as something different. And yes, it's true. You need to get lean to see your apps. but when you build them They're just going to be more visible at higher body fat percentages. I experienceced this myself. It'd be interesting to test the likeike what that is on average, like the percentage. I know we've speculated on here. We've talked we've talked about this. like You know, the difference of like building your abs, you know, you could probably see them at two to three percent higher body fure. That's right You know is what I would I would speculate. How would it' be cool to see an actual like study around that? Well, think about an arm. Think about a guy who's sixteen percent body fat. So that's not lean enough to be considered like really lean, but it's athletic, right Th about a guy with a lot of musle has who's at sixteen percent body fat? What his arm looks like versus a guy with no muscle at sixteen percent body fat. What does his arm look like? I mean, I would go even as high as eighteen, ninety percent. If you If you train your muscles for a long period of time and you have and you have them decent arms even at Even at eighteen percent, nineteen percent body fat You look like you work out. That's right.. So if you train wrong to get a six pack, you're just not going to build them. so that it can be much more difficult to make them visible. And then if you eat wrong Here's what happens if you eat wrong, You lose muscle or you gain fat. You may lose weight on the scale, but you're not leaner. Remember leaner What we're after for is leaner and leaner is body composition. Leaner is not necessarily lighter. or skinnier. Yeah. So a guy and you could pull this up. you could probably find this online. If you picked up if you pulled up a six foot tall guy at ten percent body fat who' two hundred pounds. versus a nineteen percent body fat six foot tall guy at two hundred pounds They look radically different. Yeah. They look very, very different. In fact, most people would think that the ten percent body fat guy is much lighter Uh, but he's just leaner. He's a lot leaner. So if you don't train right and you don't eat right or you do things the wrong way, Well you end up with is No results, Or maybe even worse results. What I have seen so many times in the past is that people will do this the wrong way and they lose weight and actually end up flabbier than they were before because of the amount of muscle that they lost. They're actually weaker and flabbier at a lighter body weight on the scale. Yeah. And so if you're after a six pack, what you want to do is get leaner and build. Yeah. You don't want to lose muscle in the process. That's right. So here's step one. Step one is we want to start tracking. We want to start tracking because we're going to be trying to be in a what's known as a calorie deficit. So anytime you want to lose Body fat, you have to eat. less calories than you're burning Okay And in order to do that, you have to know how many calories you're burning on a regular basis. Now there's a couple of ways to do this You could get a general number. you could go to mapsmacro. com. We have a macro calculator And this will give you kind of general idea of where you're where you may be at, but it's not perfectly accurate. In fact, there is no perfectly accurate way to know how many cowers you're consuming or should I say burning versus tracking. Tracking is the most accurate way to do this. And so what you would do is over the next, let's say, seven days is you would not change your diet whatsoever. And you would use a tracking app to track everything that you eat and drink And you're not changing anything. The goal is just to see what you average on a regular basis. By the way, just one tip on this, You want to track in real time U In fact, I saw some data on this earlier. And it was like a dub moment for me What people sometimes do when they track is they wait till the end of the day. Terrible. to track. The I've seen the stats on this the percent the percentage that you're likely to be off when you do that, it dramatically increases. Yes. Yeah instead of doing it in real time. Yeah. So like right when you finish eating ract to me. What's crazy Adam is now there are apps that you screenshot it. You could screenshot it. Yeah. and they're remarkably accurate. Whereas, you know, Wolf shees, when I was a trainer back in the day, we used to have a book Was it calorieing? Is that the name of it?? You'd have to like look it up and then weigh your food and do the whole thing. And then apps got better and you had to kind of know the weaight or enter the food. But now you can literally take a picture of it and it'll track it for you right then and there Don't leave anything out, track everything you eat, everything you drink for seven days. so you can get an average of what you're consuming. and this is what we're going to assume is no is your baseline. So if you're averaging every single day twenty thousand seven hundred calories then this is what your body is burning on a regular basis. You're consuming twenty seven, this is what you're probably burning. So now we know what your baseline is. and so we want to go below that in order to lose some body. Yeah, I would add to that because What happens sometimes somebody hears this episode and it prompts them to, you know want to k kick it up a notch or get back to being consistent. And then this first week, a mistake I see sometimes is They track, but they track the first week of their dieting already. They They're try to clean it up. They've already modified it. They've already exactly. They've already made behavior. It's like I always used to have to tell clients like, listen, this sounds weird But I want you to eat completely normal, meananing If you normally go get that frappuccino in the morning, you know, at Starbucks, I want you to do it and just we're just doing to track it now. If you normally Have a late night snack. I want you to do it. I want you to do the things that you normally do. so I have a true baseline Um becausecause if you just send people off to track for a week and they're now motivated to track into a diet and go to and like they tend to change behaviors because they know they're tracking. because there's there's a bunch of research on that too. like people that just track automatically start to eat less eat less because they know they're tracking. And so I would always have to put this emphasis on listen, we're trying to really find your baseline right now And so I really want normal week of eating, this is not me going, oh, that's bad or good or measuring any of that. It's like we want to see your normal patterns and behavi. Now why is that so important? Because if you go in too large of a deficit, the risk of losing muscle goes up. That's right. So if you have somebody who already starts to correct behaviors and is eating cleaner, i. e. shaving now two hundred fif, five hundred calories a day because they know they're trreacking. And then your coach or then you take the advice you're about to give or you reduce calories Well, now you put them in this massive deficit they didn't need to be in, because they already were in a deficit because they're tracking. Yeah. So in other words, I may want to put someone in a calorie deficit of five hundred to seven hundred calories, but because the person already cleaned up, quote unquote their diet When they were tracking, now I accidentally put them at a twelve hundred calorie deficit, which increases the odds that they're going to lose musle. and we don't want to lose muscle. Losing muscle is the wrong strategy, especially if you want to see muscles. You wantan to see muscle, you want to see your abs They gott to be there. You got to have them built. and losing muscle' is not going to compate. You might get lighter on the scale, but you're not going to get necessarily leaner So you want to track for about seven days. and we also want to start tracking some measurements. So waste measurement is a great way to do this You can measure your wasaist with a circumference tape and do this at the same time every single day and get a nice general number If this starts to go down, you're probably getting leaner. You tend to not build tons of muscle around the waist, so it's not like measuring your arm or it could get bigger as you get leaner type of deal. Your waist probably won't do much of that. So waist is a real basic easy way to do this. Or you can use a body fat test, which is great as well Again, if you're testing your body fat percentage, you want to look at trends. Don't look at the number that you just got based off the last one Over the next few weeks or whatever, we're looking at trends. Which direction is it going Then we get to the diet part. So now you're like, okay I know what my calories are normally. I'm going to cut my calories down. tyypically you want to go by five hundred below what you were averaging, and you may be tempted to go even more than that. Don't do that. It'll increase your odds of rebound or increase your odds of losing muscle. And we can always go lower later. You could later, right? Leave some room. So give just five hundred. That's it. five hundred below what you were eating And now here's what we're going to do. I want you to eat body weight in grams of protein. Eat your target body weight. in grams of protein This accelerates fat loss So when they compare diet, diet to diet with the calories are the same, both in the calorie deficit, the high protein version loses more body fat and maintains more muscle. So In other words, youll lose the same amount of weight Except some more of it's going to come from muscle if the protein isn't where we're saying it, by the way. And if you look up high protein, RDA, it's not what we're saying We're saying optimal protein from what we see in the studies, the upper limit from where you're going to get benefit, which is close to about a gram of protein per pound of target body weight. You also want to avoid heavily processed foods heavily processed foods make you overeat In the data, when you look at the studies and you compare and they compare these diets together, really well controlled studies People consume five to six hundred or more calories when they eat processed foods with the same level of satidey, meaneing same level of fullness, but I just ate six hundred or more calories. And that's just processed foods are engineered to make you really want to overrereat And then the third thing is avoid foods that give you bloat We are talking about wanting to see your abs Bloat isn't necessarily body fat. but if you want to see your abs, bloat will take away from that. And the foods that tend to contribute to blow. this isn't true for everybody, but generally speaking, these are the foods that tend to be the greatest offenders, they tend to be gluten Dairy eggs or legoons or all three of those. So I would try to look at easily digestible foods or foods that don'tuse bloat. Now if those food don't cause bloat to you, that's totally fine. I would say of all of them, gluten seems to be the most consistent with the people that I've worked with that causes the most blow. So I'd say stay away from it. You know I think it's It is a good time. You're on a kick You're going to you're going to start this plan Uh maybe you think those foods don't cause that I think it's a good time to test that. Yeah Rember. I would always encourage clients that we were like, let' say we' we're heading we're going to set set a goal like this as we get to our CR abs And maybe I'd ask them previously like, you know, are you allergic to any foods or intolerant to anything? No, no, I'm good. Gluten's fine, dairy's fine. They'd tell me that And then we go on this kick where we're really dialing in and we're trying to really move the needle or see visible change in your abs A lot of times I would encourage them, Hey, I know you told me that You know, you don't have any issues with gluten or this and that. But since we're doing this anyways and we're eating whole let's try and actually limit this or cut this out for a little bit, justust tell me how you feel. I'm just curious A lot of times I would encourage them to do that because what I've found is It's there's a spectrum here. There is definitely people that are very aware they have a dairy intolerance. Theres There's no denying that. you know That's like immediately. Yeah, you have something and it affects you immediately. Then you have somebody who I think is like like I'm a lower on that spectrum. likeike I can get away with a serving or so of dairy. I start hitting two servings of dairy or three servings of dairy in a day and I start to have I see I see stool issues, I see bloat. I start to notice that. So I think a lot of people fall somewhere on that spectrum and they assume because they don't have this loud signal that says you're intolerant to it, that they don't have a mild intolerance to it.. And so what a great time You're trying to see your abs. Like how about we pull this out for a little bit. And I have found that a lot of clients who are okay with eating those foods realize, you know what? I was okay, but I'm even better when I don't And I see my abs, I'm leaner. I feel And so this is a good time. I would encourage even the people that think They have no intolerance to this to test out pulling some of those out and see how you and see if you see an improvement. If you see no improvement after the sixty, ninety days that you're doing this, then cool, have it in there But I would say eighty percent of the clients that thought they had no intolerance whatsoever to any of those foods When I convinced them to at least try that sawn improvement. Yeah, it's interesting too because there's also that delayed effect like a day or That's later That's right. Now you're not pinning it specifically to that food group unless you're really tracking that. So I think it is like, you know, it's something to peer into In my experience of the foods that can cause this, like these kind of mild intolerances I can count on one hand the amount of clients that I had that gluten didn't affect them in this way. Yeah. So in other words, the majority of them did better without gluten. Just just again, this is based on my experience. with the clients I worked with Dairy is an interesting one U tyypically people from Northern European origins seem to do be okay, but you can look this up. You can look at lactose intolerance across the world. Northern European is very low. Is he going more into Mediterranean? Lactose intolerance increases.. Asia, Africa, you know, South America, you start to see lactose, you know issues start to go up. So you could test that one out. if you don't have an intolerance to it go for it. But I think what Adam said is absolutely A great idea. likeike you might as well go on go on it for now, reintroduce them later and see what happens. Yeah and aat will totally mess up your ability to see your abs for sure. You could have abs get bloated and no suddenly you h there's and I feel like everybody has kind of seen an example this. at least if you're relatively lean, obbviously if you're thirty, forty percent body fat, you may not experience this But if you are in the high teens And you've had mornings where you wake up and you're like, oh my Godd You look lean and you feel like that that's a difference of a lot of like bloat water attention changing through the night, right? And so there's a good chance there's foods in your diet that are causing some of this. And the way I would have clients do it that didn't think they had any sort of intolerances. It like one week it would be just dairy that we'd focus on. L let's eliminate all dairy this week. Report back how you feel You know, how do you feel? Do you notice anything? Do you feel like No, okay, cool. That's fine. Okaykay. now let's do gluten. And so choose some of those big offenders Fus on them for at least a week of completely eliminating the diet and be honest with how you feel and see if you notice A positive. And again, eighty percent of my clients that said they didn't have, obviously my clients that knew they had intolerance seew a make massive difference But the ones that didn't even think they had an intolerance saw a chunk of them saw back. saw improvement..w improvement just by eliminating one of those sames. All right let's get to the workout portion. and so the two primary ways people tend to work out these days when they're trying to change how their body looks is cardiovascular training and weight training or strength training. Which one is better for a six pack? Well, you may think cardio because cardio burns tons of calories and it does Fty five minutes of cardo will burn more calories than forty five minutes of strength training But here's the thing that cardio training doesn't do. It doesn't build muscle. In fact, it can encourage Muscle loss in the calorie deficit. We see these in the studies And I'll take it a step further. When they compare strength training to cardio, okay, one to one for pure fat loss strength training wins. Why you don't lose muscle when you strength strength. So the form of exercise you should focus on, I'm not saying don't do cardio, but if you're going to prioritize a form of exercise for a six pack. gotot to make it strengthen And now let's get to the type of strength training. We're trying to build our abs. Train your abs like any other muscle you're trying to build. If you want a six pack You need to build your abs. You're not trying to improve the endurance and stamina of your abves. Now there's nothing wrong with endurance and stamina at all. It's great to have lots of endurance and stamina. But most ab training routines are basically like doing a marathon for your abs. Likeag imagine trying to build your quads and so you just run marathons. You can have big quads running marathons? No, you have very skinny legs Ring marathons. You want to strength train for your abs. what that looks like is resistance It looks like reps in the ten rep twelve rep eight rep range And you're also training them in a full range of motion. The other mistake people make with ab training besides doing fifty, sixty a hundred reps is they do very short choppy movements to try to get as many reps as possible. A full range of motion for the abs looks like full extension full contraction. If I'm fully extending my abs, I actually go beyond a flat back. I actually go back even further. and a physio ball allows you to do this, for example, a full situ. and then full contraction. You also want to understand what the abs do The abs close the distance between your lower rib cge pelvis, they flex you at the lumbar spine. They do not flex you with the hip. okay. It's not a hip hinge Hip hinging is not working your abs. Now you may feel your abs Doing a bunch of hip hinging ab exercises because the ab are trying to stabilize you. you're not working them in a full range of motion. It would be like me holding a dumbbell out with my arm extended and lifting with my shoulder. My bicep will get a little tired But I'm not doing a curl, right? So you want Purl your body with that full range of motion use resistance build the abs. And again, if you build them like any of the muscle, they'll look way better even at higher body fat percentages. You know, my competitors that I used to train I used to tell them, let's let the diet take care of the burning fat. phase of this and let's focus the exercise on keeping muscle So the diet will take care of the burning body fat And then the exercise should be focused on keeping muscle And if the exercise portion is focused on cute muscle, the best things that we could do is, you know, strength train, lift heavy. And to your point, you know, this lifting heavy for the abs, long rest periods. it would not be circuit training. It would not be super setting. It would not be hit training. It would not be cardiovascular training. That is not our strategy for keeping as much muscle as possible. The diet is going to take care of the fat burning part. That's If we're in a caloric deficit through diet, we're going to lean out And then everything I do inside the gym should be about keeping muscle And getting on a treadmill and running for an hour is counterproductive to that strategy And so if we do a really good job On the diet portion and follow everything you're talking about, then all of my time in the gym should be centered around, let's keep as much muscles as I possibly can, i. e., strength training, long rest periods and not focus around cardi back. Yeah. I think the long I mean, obviously, it makes sense that people have been doing tons of reps, but also too They'll do like isometric holds for a long period of time for endurance, which here, like we're trying to say, you know, adding weight, were adding resistance and actually doing full range of motion with contraction is going to be a better result. That's right. Now we have build a six pack program called the NoBS six pack formula And it's put together into two phases. So one phase is lower rep One phase is higher up. you're hitting your core, your abs, your obliques twice a week in the program and in between you're doing what are called trigger sessions. It's the most powerful program that exists for building your abs so you get a six pack. And if you go now to nobs sixpack. com and use the code six pack You get the whole program. So it's a whole program. exercises, demos, the whole deal You get it for twenty eight dollars and fifty cents. That's it twenty eight fiftyents the full noBS six pack program. Again, it's noBS six, the number six pack dot com The code is six pack. for the fifty percent off