Should I Work Abs Everyday?

Step 1

[Personal Trainer] You mentioned earlier that you felt it was necessary to train your abs every day. I'm going to ask you why. [College Student] I just, I just feel like you're exercising and taking all this protein, and consuming all these carbs, and I know on a guy it typically goes right here. [Personal Trainer] For sure.

Step 2

[College Student] That's why I'm concerned. I don't want to lose like my six pack. So, that's what I do abs every day.

Step 3

[Personal Trainer] So, you're saying, first of all any weight loss are fat loss is a function of calorie burning, do you agree upon that point, yes? [College Student] Ah, weight loss yes.

Step 4

[Personal Trainer] It's energy, yes. You burn more energy than you take in; and your gonna to lose weight hopefully in the form of fat. So, agree with me on that point?

Step 5

[Personal Trainer] Okay, now your argument is that you're going to do more ab work to keep the midsection tighter, implying that you're burning more energy doing more ab work. Well, I'm going to tell you that if you want to keep the midsection tighter, your better suited doing cardiovascular exercise, or anything but abs because the amount of calories that you're going to burn during a crunch or 100 sets of crunches - for that matter - is like a drop in the ocean compared to 20 minutes on the treadmill. [College Student] Hmm. Okay.

Step 6

[Personal Trainer] So, you see why using that argument, daily ab training really doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Now, if you were to use the reasoning that you're on a train your abs every day in order to get my abs more muscular, (which a lot of people do)... [College Student] I like that, yeah.

Step 7

[Personal Trainer] That's completely different. That has nothing to do with body fat, per se. That's actually adding muscle to the abdominals. I would follow up with another question: if you were to train your abs once a day for maximal development, would train your arms once a day? [College Student] um.

Step 8

[Personal Trainer] That was a trick question. [Personal Trainer] No, feel free to answer. [College Student] In my past routine, yeah. [Personal Trainer] But, has it worked? Well Nik you haven't gained a pound in a year.

Step 9

[College Student] I haven't gained weight, but I've been able to lift more. [Personal Trainer] Well, that's good. That is good. A lot of strength is a function of just your nervous system getting better at moving the movement, which is kind of them point I'm trying to make.

Step 10

In order to get a muscle grow, you need to stimulate it with an intense workout. And the growth process happens days or even a week after you have initiated that process in motion.

Step 11

Ditto for Abdominals. You can look at muscle fiber composition of all of various muscle groups and come up with a trend of which muscle groups respond more to intense very intermittent work and which muscle groups respond more to more consistent, lower intensity work. And the abs have very very high proportion of - traditionally - fast twitch muscle fibers. Calves on the other hand, you can get away with training every single day and you'll get a fair amount of development.

Step 12

Problem is, most people have these nice tight tone and very underdeveloped abdominals - the result of training them everyday.

Step 13

So, you're gonna give it a try and if that doesn't work fantastic for you, we'll talk about maybe training them twice a week. I'm not so set in stone that we won't give you a little bit leeway. But, daily training for any body part even if its calves is a bit too much.