Ready to get those abs?!?!? Well, I’ve got some news for you that you probably won’t like to hear, BUT if you actually want to have abs, then it is a must!!! Here should be your priorities to get abs:

Workout 3-5 days a week, in a way that is functional to your life.
Sleep 8+ hours a night. Sleep is probably the biggest performance and body enhancing drug that exists.
Eat real food, mostly vegetables, not too much.
Get plenty of daily, non-exercise movement in. That includes just being active and accumulating 10,000 steps through out the day (not including workouts), do 10 minutes of yoga-ish stuff, and doing some more precise mobility exercises on your body with various mobility tools.

I get it. I was once where you were and I just wanted to work hard in the gym to get results. You will not outwork in the gym an unhealthy lifestyle outside of the gym. If you are on this page because you’ve been working out and are not happy with your results on your abs, go through the checklist above first! What are abs for any way if they don’t come along with performance, other aesthetics, tissue and joint health, and overall health and wellness. Building abs under belly fat pushes out the belly fat even more! There is no road to abs that involves working out, adding ab exercises, and continuing to not sleep, eat crappy food, and sit all day. I’m sorry. I’m not telling you this because I want it to be the answer, I am telling you because it is the reality. The people who have abs, prioritize at the very least their nutrition. You already have ab muscles, you just need to show them off!

Another consideration: muscle definition, balance, and symmetry is key. As a coach, part of what helps me identify people’s movement dysfunction and therefore injury risk and performance issues is how their muscles are defined. The rectus abdominis, the top “6-pack”abs, have their place, but it is for flexing the truck. If we put our entire focus on the rectus abdominius and leave behind the rectus femorus, transverse abdominius, internal obliques, the external obliques and all of the muscles of the back and hip, etc. we are likely to develop a pattern of using our core that mis-uses muscles and will have a major impact on performance and potentially on injury as well. Only focusing on the 6-pack almost always comes with tight front of the neck, shoulder forward posture, and lower back issues due to incorrect bracing. This isn’t just a performance and injury issue, it can create an aesthetic issue too.

One last consideration: at MovementLink, although we may do accessory work every now and then, we do not train muscles in silos, so if we do isolate muscle, we need to tie it back in and integrate it properly in our training, so after accessory work, it is always good to include some functional movement that integrates that muscle you worked back in as part of your cool-down.

If you’ve checked all the above boxes, then let’s get into how to appropriately add addition core training to your current workout program.

Abdominal Training

Frequency

Smaller muscles tend to recover faster and can handle more weekly volume than larger muscles, so the abs can actually be exercised 2-4 days a week. The consideration with abs, is that we use them a lot, to brace our core, in our regular training and we do ab-specific exercises (sit-ups, toes-to-bars, etc.) in workouts too. If you are following MovementLink programming and you are sleeping, eating good food, and getting adequate non-exercise activity, the amount you are already doing is enough to get a 6-pack. But, if you want to be a little more aggressive with it, I would start (and probably stick to) simply adding 1 extra accessory work session after a workout each week. If you have also checked out our upper body, push/pull accessory work programs, then doing abs on the same day can be a good compliment and use of your time. We’ll talk more about integrating them in the Sets and Reps section. So, you could add in your extra upper body and ab work all in the same 10 minute extra session once a week…pretty reasonable time-wise and very effective for getting in extra work that has a big impact on results.

Before we move on, you just want to be smart and work with your coach about the best day to add ab work in. Generally, if I am adding it in, I’ll add it in with the upper body accessory work, but sometimes in my program the next day has abs, and I like to have my fatiguing ab work separated by at least 1 day.

Sets and Reps

Adding in 3-5 Hard Sets each week to MovementLink programming is a great place to start. Here, we use the terms “hard” and “failure” to provide a sense of how many reps you should do when people are going to vary dramatically. If we were doing back squats at 70% of a 1 rep max, I would know exactly how many reps you would need to get in to get an appropriate stimulus from the workout. With sit-ups, mountain climbers, toes-to-bars, etc., the number of reps will vary across people greatly, so we use:

Failure Set to mean do reps until your technique breaks down or you cannot physically do another rep.
Hard Set means to do reps until your technique breaks down or you are 1-2 reps shy of failure.

Ideally, we’ll get about 2-5 minutes of rest between sets. But, because the focus is on your abdominal muscles, we can rest your abs while we do other things. This is where the efficiency of doing your ab accessory work exercises along with your upper body, push/pull accessory work exercises or lower body accessory work exercises can be very time-efficient. We call them super sets and it just means that while one muscle group is resting, we’ll work other groups. An upper body super set may look something like:

3 Super Sets
Hard Set Double Dumbbell Bench Press
Hard Set of Dumbbell Laying Knee Raises
Hard Set Double Dumbbell Bent-over Rows
Hard Set Dumbbell Russian Twists

You would rest about 20 seconds to a minute between each exercise. By the time you have done the rows, Russian twists, and the bench presses and made your way back around to the laying knee raises, your rectus abdominus will have gotten plenty of rest. Additionally, if we are simply adding these 3 super sets in after a workout, we are already mostly warmed-up, so the total added time to the workout will be only about 10 minutes. So, 10 minutes once a week, is very reasonable for the results that come along with it.

Optimal muscle building (hypertrophy) sets are typically between 8 and 12 reps. So, that doesn’t mean that doing a set of 50 sit-ups won’t have muscle building effects, but if we can make the majority of our ab accessory work exercises where a hard set falls within that 8-12 range, then we will likely get better results. Additionally, 8-12 reps takes a lot less time than 50+, so there’s time benefits there too. This leads us into the next principle, overloading.

You can either trade cycles and work different muscles of the “abs” or you can add in additional exercises to target the transverse abdominal and obliques. These exercises look more like twists and side bends and can be worked in like the example above. Don’t forget about your back muscles too! Your back may be getting plenty of work in through regular workouts, but you may want to add in a cycle here and there. In the above example the bent-over rows will work the back, so that’s one way to be more time efficient too.

Overloading

To continue making progress we need to do something harder than before. The variation needs to be harder, we need to do more reps, or we need to do slower reps of the same number for more time under tension. However we do it, we need a way to progress our exercises to be harder. As you get better and better at sit-ups, you’ll get into ridiculous numbers that you need to do for a hard set and it eats up a bunch of time. Body weight exercises can have progressions that make them harder as we go, but for the most part, weighted exercises are the easiest to overload because you can simply vary the weight over time.

Mini-Cycles

For accessory work, we like to take advantage of adaptations to increase our work load. Mini-cycles of 2-6 weeks (I typically recommend 4) allow your body to adapt to the stimulus. Constantly varied and muscle confusion gets thrown around a lot and it has it’s place, but for strength and muscle building the amount your will progress in a short time is incredible if you stick with the same exercises. This will allow you to overload the exercise and more effectively work your body and develop technique. But, diminishing returns sets in as we stick with the same exercise, so we need vary what we are doing every few weeks to keep the muscles sensitized to training. This can be very simple to do, so here’s an example:

3 Super Sets
Hard Set Double Dumbbell Bench Press
Hard Set of Dumbbell Laying Knee Raises
Hard Set Double Dumbbell Bent-over Rows
Hard Set Dumbbell Russian Twists

Do the above accessory work super set for 4-weeks in a row. Each week you’ll want to either do more reps, add weight, or do slower reps than the weeks before. After 4 weeks, just simply switch up the exercises. You can change the order, change your grip/stance, change the weight dramatically, or change the exercises entirely.

Recovery

Remember, more work needs more recovery. As you’re adding in more ab exercises, you’ll want to pay attention to the typical areas that get tight. Your abs, hip-flexors, quads, chest, and front of the neck. Make sure you are checking in on these areas frequently as it usually doesn’t take long for these areas to need some more mobility love. Don’t wait until you feel it, stay out ahead of it!

Summary

I understand that this article was probably not what you were looking for, BUT my goal is always to provide you what you need, not what you want and I hope you found the insights helpful and actionable. So, to the actionable end, below I’ll give some examples of ab exercises.

Select one ab exercise and maybe a second transverse abdominal or oblique exercise.
Choose one of your workouts a week and do 3-5 hard sets of that exercise after that workout. Try and separate your ab workout from another fatiguing ab workout by at least one day.
Rest about 2-5 minutes between your ab exercises. Since you’re doing it already, during this “rest” would be a great time to also add in upper body or lower body accessory work.
Do the same exercises for 4 weeks in a row trying to increase the work your do each week.
Also add in extra abs, hip-flexors, quads, chest, and front of the neck mobility work. We don’t get to add work without adding recovery, it just comes with the territory.

Examples of Variation

Here is a very simple example of variation with very similar exercises: sit-ups that all involve an AbMat. Potentially, you are looking at 12 weeks of Ab Accessory Work using each one of these exercises for 4 weeks in a row during a mesocycle. The stance in the body-weight sit-up will vary the exercise slightly and obviously the dumbbell weighted sit-up will add variation to the traditional by way of weight. Overloading in the body-weight sit-ups would be adding reps, and overloading the weighted sit-up could occur by either adding reps or adding weight. For this example, if you were going to choose these three exercises, I would order them like below to have the most variation from cycle to cycle.

With so many ab exercises to choose from, ideally you would not put three so similar together in sequential cycles, but this would provide enough variation to elicit a great stimulus for a few months!

Here is an example, but please keep in mind there are many effective and smart ways to add ab accessory work:

AbMat Sit-up (Traditional Stance)

Week 1: 3-4 Reps Shy of Failure
Week 2: 2-3 Reps Shy of Failure
Week 3: 1-2 Reps Shy of Failure
Week 4: 0-1 Reps Shy of Failure

Adding to the MovementLink Program, perform 3 Hard Sets matching or increasing reps each relative to each set compared to the previous week attempting to generally hit the effort levels listed above.

For example, if in week 1, attempting to stop 3-4 reps shy of failure you completed:

Week 1 Set 1: 50 Sit-ups
Week 1 Set 2: 40 Sit-ups
Week 1 Set 3: 38 Sit-ups

Then, in Week 2, you would try and match or increase reps on each set attempting to stop 2-3 reps shy of failure this time. If may look something like:

Week 2 Set 1: 55 Sit-ups
Week 2 Set 2: 42 Sit-ups
Week 2 Set 3: 38 Sit-ups

Repeat in this fashion for weeks 3 and 4.

Dumbbell-weighted Sit-up

Week 5: 3-4 Reps Shy of Failure
Week 6: 2-3 Reps Shy of Failure
Week 7: 1-2 Reps Shy of Failure
Week 8: 0-1 Reps Shy of Failure

For this example, because it’s weighted, to add volume you have the option of staying at the same weight and adding reps or adding weight. I recommend staying at the same weight and adding reps and then adding weight the next time you cycle this exercise.

Here’s what I would recommend:

Ideally, our accessory work sets would be between 5 and 30 reps, so I would choose a dumbbell that will get me there. If I don’t have any previous notes, I would wing it and if I get to 15 and it is still really easy, I would stop, not count that set, and go heavier.

If in week 1, attempting to stop 3-4 reps shy of failure with a specific dumbbell you completed:

Week 1 Set 1: 18 Sit-ups
Week 1 Set 2: 14 Sit-ups
Week 1 Set 3: 12 Sit-ups

Then, in Week 2, using the same weight from week 1, you would try and match or increase reps on each set attempting to stop 2-3 reps shy of failure this time. If may look something like:

Week 2 Set 1: 19 Sit-ups
Week 2 Set 2: 15 Sit-ups
Week 2 Set 3: 12 Sit-ups

AbMat Sit-up (Butterfly Stance)

Week 9: 3-4 Reps Shy of Failure
Week 10: 2-3 Reps Shy of Failure
Week 11: 1-2 Reps Shy of Failure
Week 12: 0-1 Reps Shy of Failure

I think you get the drill. With just body-weight, you will try and increase volume each week through matching or adding reps and following the general guidance of how hard your sets should be based on the above weekly rep suggestions.

Your “Abs” and “Core” are not just one muscle. Ignoring the back for now (which you should not ignore in your training), the core is generally considered to be made up of the Rectus Abdominus, Transverse Abdominus, Internal Obliques, and External Obliques. So, don’t just focus on the 6-pack mucles (the rectus abdominus). Like we talked about in the frequency section, you can train abs much more than other muscles, so if you are going to be adding core exercises, make sure to have a lot of variation that involves rotation, side bends, twists, and the classic straight forward ab exercises.

A Guide to Abs

Demos, Technique Videos, and Training Information

Ab Exercise Demos

Technique Videos