Fitness: How Often Can I Work My Abs?

By Team Beachbody

One of the most commonly asked questions on the Beachbody Message Boards is how often can one work their abdominal muscles. It was long thought that the abs (as well as the forearms) could be worked everyday. The reason for this is that the muscles of your abdominal region contain a higher percentage of slow-twitch muscle fibers than your other muscles do. Slow-twitch muscle fiber is not as strong (or powerful) as fast-twitch muscle fiber, but it is slower to fatigue and also recovers quicker. For this reason, the theory that abs can be worked everyday went unchallenged for a long time, and even today you will hear trainers profess this.

However, the bottom line is that the abdominal muscles need rest to recover completely, just the same as any muscle group. While you won't get the same telltale signs that you will in other areas, what will happen is that you will plateau if you keep training the abs everyday. It is during rest where your body begins to repair this damaged tissue, and that's what helps you get muscle tone. Short-circuiting the recuperation process will not allow adequate time for your muscles to regenerate, ultimately impeding your progress. And you wouldn't want to put all that time and effort into something that wasn't doing you any good.

Just like the other muscle groups, abs respond best to high-intensity training, or quality over quantity. You should work them to exhaustion and then rest until they are nearly fully recovered when you can attack them again. In a routine like Power 90^®, the most abs should be worked is four times a week. But this should only be in the early stages of a program, when they are just getting in shape and individual workouts are much less fatiguing. The concept of Slim Training^®(tm) allows for training the abs every day - but only for 6 weeks. Once you are hammering away until "failure", you will never want to work them more than 3 times a week.

There are a couple of things to remember about ab training. One is that you want to make sure you continue to increase the intensity. Abs will respond fairly quickly and you can't settle into a comfortable routine if you expect results. You need to push well into your pain threshold if you expect major change. Learn to love the burn!

The other is that you will not ever have a washboard stomach if your body fat is 20% or more. Many people blast their abs to oblivion when what they really need to do is excuse themselves from the table. Good examples of this are the midsections of many pro-football linemen. They have ripped abs that can't be seen because they are covered with fat. Since sheer mass is important for their job security, they don't care about losing it in order to look chiseled. Strength and weight are paramount. But all the muscle in the world won't do much for your appearance if it's covered with fat.

As a rule, you only need to train your abs twice per week and your entire ab-toning program should take only ten minutes to complete. If you train with proper intensity, this is all that is required to sufficiently tax your muscles. While this might not seem like a lot of time, your abs should be totally fatigued by the time you are finished training - and then it's on to burning the fat with cardio.