How Do You Get Six-Pack Abs?

8 min readApr 14, 2020

It’s “older” and like most things on Quora it has been redirected numerous times and I always have a hard time finding it when I want to link to new answers on Quora.

As I have in the past, I’m reissuing it here on Medium for ease of access and sharing. Also, so I can clean up the article a little bit. 😉

Now the internet is riddled with answers to this question and I’ll be honest, I think it’s the wrong question. If for no other reason than it’s short-sighted and it’s been beaten to death.

I probably just hate it though because I get asked it all the time and it’s a pretty simple answer:

Eat and train in a manner that leads to a low body fat percentage. (<10%-ish for Men and <14%-ish for Women)
Train the torso for hypertrophy of the musculature.

More easily said, than done. Getting six-pack abs is simple, just not easy.

The reason I say it’s the wrong question is that the fitness industry preys on people looking for the easy solution to this question. It’s probably one of the most fraudulent practices circling the internet as a general rule. More people are duped by the six-pack abs objective, than I’d be willing to bet, any other pursuit besides ‘getting rich quick’ and maybe ‘lose a ton of weight fast.’

Almost 10 times out of 10, I can guarantee it’s someone saying eat like this for 4–12 weeks and train like this for 4–12 weeks. It is mostly a lot of crunches and ‘ab’ workouts. Stuff that might make you feel like you’re making progress but probably aren’t (for reasons I’ll explain below). And you know, the odd person does it and has success but I bet the stats for success are low.

It just comes from the wrong place.

There is no easy solution, you have to train hard for an extended period of time and be very mindful of what you eat. You have to build the appropriate lifestyle and commit to the objective.

A little secret: Almost everyone I know that maintains a six-pack doesn’t, and never did deliberately train for it.

It’s a by-product of learning good training and nutrition practices.

Just what those practices are exactly is always slightly different for everybody, but it starts with making the commitment, executing a plan and adapting along the way.

First, consider that maybe you do not have the natural physical structure to obtain a six-pack. Most people do not even consider the contrast thinking that maybe their objective is not realistic. Optimism is great, but you should always contrast your optimism with realism.

Some people simply do not have the tendon structure in their abdominals, no matter how lean they get and no matter how many crunches they do. They will never obtain a super ripped six-pack.

So adjust your expectations, maybe it’s a four-pack, or maybe you just won’t have awesome definition but you’ll still look really good.

It’s been my experience that the reason most people do not achieve a six-pack, is that their expectations do not match their lifestyle.

You can’t generally drink a lot, party a lot, eat whatever you want and otherwise lead a lifestyle that is not conducive to the objective unless you somehow manage to maintain the appropriate energy balance.

You need to become mindful of what you do in a lot of different ways.

The higher your objective, the more work needs to be put in. Therefore it’s easier for most people to maintain a healthy trim physique than it is for people to manage a six-pack.

Many people you see with ripped/shredded physiques in magazines, don’t look like that all year, they use dehydration and other tricks to look a certain way for a brief moment in time.

That’s another expectation people should adjust.

The people who do maintain it, are very involved in fitness and nutrition constantly. Their second home is the gym and when they are at home they cook.

If you don’t like training in some respect, good luck maintaining a six-pack. If you don’t like cooking or don’t want to think and take control over your eating, again, good luck getting and maintaining a six-pack.

Maintain high but realistic expectations and you increase your chances of success.

Second, beyond the genetic component to this, you need to create an ideal environment. Genes need the ideal environment to express themselves. By all accounts, most research suggests that your physique is about 50% genes and 50% environment.

If you started exercising young, you’ve got a head start. If you’re late to the party (i.e. trying to get a six-pack when you’re 40) you probably have a little more work to put in. It’d doable, but your skills/habits are behind by way of your age.

Body fat needs to drop low. Typically lower than 14% for women, and lower than 10% for Men.

So nutrition and achieving a negative energy balance consistently to shed body fat is a necessary component in tandem with exercise. If you’re serious, I recommend getting measurements done or learning how to measure yourself (DEXA scans are the current gold standard) with callipers.

Measure what matters, and in this context that’s body fat %.

Eat a lot of whole foods, minimize sugar, processed grains, fats and proteins.

The specifics of nutrition are a deep learning curve for everyone and become increasingly more and more complicated the more high-level objective you are trying to achieve but I’d say start with some of these:

Then you need to exercise in a complete fashion. Meaning, just training your abs will not generally lead to this result. Learn how to train:

That means squats, lunges, deadlifts, pressing, pulling, etc… all on top of any ‘ab’ specific work you do. This is an ignored necessity, you can’t and shouldn’t expect to get a shredded six-pack if all you do is train abs directly. Silly rabbit, tricks are for kids...

It’s better to train the whole body and merely focus your attention on the greatest area of need to get the best training response. That means whatever is most important takes precedence. It should probably take on more total training volume in any given training routine.

Now to Ab Training Specifically.

Training the abs is somewhat unique compared to other muscles in the body but the same overall principles apply.

The location of the abdominals and their involvement in nearly everything you do at the gym already is the unique part.

So unlike other muscle groups where I might normally recommend prioritizing them by doing them first in any given resistance training program. I’m conflicted by the abdominal involvement in training as it relates to safety. Particularly how they stabilize the spine during heavy compound movements.

If you’re doing anything that day that requires a transfer between the upper and lower body through the abdominals, I believe it is unwise to do abdominal training first. It would open the door for fatigue and a lack of stability through the spine on deadlifts, lunges, squats, even chin-ups or overhead pressing.

Please don’t do that.

If however, all your other training won’t jeopardize your spine stability, then you can probably start with abdominal training. If you’re unsure about what that means, please leave a comment.

Outside of this little quirk, training the abdominals for hypertrophy is very similar to training any other muscle(s) for hypertrophy.

Six-Pack Programs

The way many programs for six-pack abs are structured in my opinion is self-fulfilling but not effective. In that, they give most people the illusion of burning pain in the mid-section. Naturally, it’s human nature to associate and mistake this as progress.

Crunches galore. That gives people a fuzzy burning sensation in their belly but typically doesn’t yield an actual training response. Hundreds of repetitions for the abs increase endurance, not tone or size. Plus, you increase the risk of spine pain with all that twisting and rotating uncontrollably to failure at 50 reps.

To get hypertrophy, you need to add load. If you can do more than ~20 or ~25 of anything without getting towards technical failure, you won’t get the training effect you want.

Try moves that require more effort and decrease the number of reps you can do until you reach technical failure.

For example, Pikes instead of Crunches. Try a Swiss Ball Pike, if you can do more than 15 to vertical, you don’t need to do SB Pikes, you need to do hanging pikes, if you can do more than 15 hanging pikes to vertical, then you need to do a loaded kneeling crunch.

But what about my ‘upper abs?’ You might think…

It’s really the same muscle, you don’t have an upper and a lower rectus abdominis per se. You just have different motor units. You get more electrical activity in the lower or upper part for certain exercises and less for other exercises. Believe it or not, chin-ups cause more electrical activity in your rectus abdominis, than crunches…

Not that electrical activity alone should dictate your exercise selection.

Your abdominals are ideally trained when they have to resist or decelerate movement. And they hypertrophy the same way other muscles do, some kind of progressive overload in a moderate rep range. ~6–12 reps, maybe 6–15 in this instance.

Instead of bicycle crunches or Russian twists (both of which cause excessive rotation in the low spine — bad news bears) do chops and lifts or rotational rows and presses. Exercises where the low back (that doesn’t like to rotate much, it has 2–4x less rotational ability than your rib level spine) gets locked in and the rotation can be trained under load in the right place.

Given that there is also a cost to benefit ratio of doing so many spine bending moves. It seems even more obvious to me, that if you’ve only got so many bends, you may as well use moves that reduce the number of bends you do in your training. Hundreds of crunches are a spinal liability, whereas 3–6 sets of 6–15, twice a week is likely near-optimal for most.

If you want to induce hypertrophy, you need the appropriate stimulus and hundreds of burning crunch variations won’t cut it.

How Do You Get Six-Pack Abs?

Now to Ab Training Specifically.

Six-Pack Programs

Written by Darren Beattie