How to Achieve a Six-Pack: A Comprehensive Guide
What does your midsection look like right now? For reference, this is what it would look like at various body fat percentages:
At 50% body fat, your waistline is quite large. At 40%, your waistline is smaller, but your abs are still buried. At 30%, your stomach is much flatter, but you still don’t have visible abs. Once you get to 20%, that’s where your abs become visible. At 10% body fat, you’ll have a well-defined six-pack, assuming you’ve developed your abs through proper training, which we’ll get to now.
At 6% body fat, you’d be truly shredded, lean enough for a pro bodybuilding competition. In fact, this is an actual real-life example of a natural bodybuilder who got down to 6.2% body fat measured by DEXA. But this zone is the six-pack sweet spot where most men want to be: between 10 and 20% body fat. This is where you’ll have visible abs but not suffer from the nasty side effects of extreme dieting. This is the same body fat display for women, where the six-pack sweet spot is around 18 to 28% body fat.
If you’re curious, this is what my abs looked like at the end of my last cut at around 10% body fat. You can see that I have more of a four-pack than a six-pack. While you can’t change the genetic structure of your abs, I’m going to explain how to get your abs to pop regardless of the genetic hand you were dealt by using three science-based tools.
Three Science-Based Tools to Develop Your Abs
First, how to train your abs optimally using just two exercises. Second, how to adjust your diet to help you calculate exactly how much fat you need to lose and how to set up your diet to mathematically guarantee that you get there as long as you follow the plan. Third, the supplements I recommend that are actually worth your money.
How to Train Your Abs Optimally
It’s popular these days to say that ab training is a waste of time because the argument goes, you can train them as much as you want, but if you’re not lean enough, you won’t see the definition anyway. But I disagree. Imagine applying this logic to any other muscle. It’d be like saying don’t train your shoulders because unless you’re lean enough, you’re not going to see the definition anyway. But no one ever says that.
The point is, you do need to train your abs so that when you cut down, there’s actually enough muscle there for them to pop through. If you build up your abdominal muscles through proper hypertrophy training, they will pop more, just like any other muscle.
But the problem with most ab training online is that most fitness influencers showcase these fast-paced, “fat-burning” circuit-style workouts, which truly are a waste of time for the most part. That’s because these workouts don’t actually get the abdominal muscles close enough to failure to stimulate meaningful hypertrophy. They are essentially just another form of cardio. Sure, you’ll burn a few extra calories, but you’re not building your six-pack.
Instead, to get your six-pack to really pop, you’d be much better off doing progressive overload training, just like you would for any other muscle. That means loading the ab muscles with weight. To build your best six-pack, you really only need two exercises: one weight-loaded crunch and one leg raise. That’s it.
For the loaded crunch, you can do a cable crunch where you grab a rope, kneel down, and crunch while allowing your lower back to round as you squeeze your abs. Don’t yank the weight with your hands; keep tension on your six-pack. If you don’t have a cable, you can do plate-weighted crunches by holding a plate against your chest and crunching down hard on your six-pack. Do these for three sets of 10 to 12 reps twice per week, taking your last set all the way to failure. That means you can’t complete a full rep despite maximum effort. Every time you train, try to add some weight or a rep while keeping your form nice and controlled. These will hit the full six-pack but probably slightly emphasize the upper four-pack.
For some lower ab bias, you should add a leg raise. For these, you can do them hanging from a pull-up bar, or you can use a Roman chair. I like the Roman chair variation better because it keeps my lower back locked in, which allows me to direct attention to my abs better. Now, if you can’t do a straight leg raise yet, you can do bent knee raises instead. Do these for three sets of 10 to 20 reps, also twice per week, and also take your last set all the way to failure. To progress on these, I prefer to add reps. So I’ll start at three sets of 10 and then I’ll add one rep each week until I get to three sets of 20. At that point, you can add some ankle weights, or you can start slowing down the negative. But once you’re there, you should have some pretty solid ab development anyway.
Planks are great for general core strength and stability, but if your goal is to build a six-pack, I don’t think they’re the most efficient option, and I would consider them optional. Also, anti-rotation movements can be great for targeting the transverse abdominis and obliques, but they won’t hit the six-pack muscles as directly or with as much tension as weighted crunches and leg raises will. Those are your main two.
This is your full six-pack training plan: hit your abs twice per week, and you can shuffle the days around to whatever fits your schedule best. It would also be smart to include some cardio in your plan, even if it isn’t required for fat loss. New research shows that combining weight training and cardio leads to smaller waists than just weight training alone. Being more active with cardio will also allow you to eat more calories, and more active people tend to be more successful in keeping the weight off over the long term. So feel free to include 2 to 5, 30-minute low to moderate intensity cardio sessions per week.
Setting Up Your Six-Pack Diet
The reality is, you can do the most optimal progressive ab training on the planet, and until you get lean enough, your abs simply won’t be visible. That’s where your nutrition comes in. So next, let’s set up your six-pack diet. It’s very simple: take your current body weight in pounds and multiply it by 10 to 12. That’s how many calories you’ll eat. Then take your goal body weight, also in pounds, and multiply it by 0.8 to 1. That’s how much protein you’ll eat. Make sure you eat at least 50 grams of fat per day, and whatever’s left over are free calories; they can be carbs, fat, or protein.
The types of foods you eat are far less important than simply hitting your daily targets. Remember the natural bodybuilder I showed earlier? He got that lean while eating Pop-Tarts regularly. But still, try to prioritize minimally processed, nutritious whole foods over highly processed, less nutritious junk food most of the time. And here’s a summary of the full six-pack diet if you want to pause and screenshot now.
Obviously, there are big differences in metabolism from person to person, and next I’m going to cover some mistakes that almost everyone makes. So keep in mind that these calories and macros won’t work perfectly for everyone. For some people, the calories will be a bit too high; for others, they’ll be a bit too low. Luckily, I spent the last two years helping create the best science-based algorithms for my nutrition app, Way, to not only lose muscle and strength but rebound all the weight back as soon as the diet is over.
For sustainable fat loss, you want to lose about 0.5 to 1% of your body weight per week. So if you currently weigh 200 pounds, try to lose about 1 to 2 pounds per week. Now, if you have a lot of weight to lose and you end up cutting for more than three months straight, I’d strongly recommend doing a 2 to 3-week diet break somewhere in the middle. For the diet break, take your current body weight in pounds and multiply it by 16 to 18, and that’ll be your calories for the 2 to 3-week diet break.
You may gain a tiny bit of water weight, or you may continue to lose weight during the diet break; everyone’s a little different in terms of how they respond. But almost everyone sees better weight loss after the diet break is over and once you resume the caloric deficit again. Another very common mistake is relying on the body weight scale too much. While the scale can be a useful tool, it can also be misleading, especially if you’re building muscle while losing fat. For this reason, I recommend taking progress photos in the same lighting at least once a month. You may feel uncomfortable doing it at first, but I promise you, you’ll be very glad you have the before photos to look back on and see how much progress you’ve made. Taking monthly waist measurements can also help show that you are, in fact, losing fat even if the scale isn’t moving as quickly as you’d like.
It’s also very common for people to have too lean of an end goal. Once you dip below the 8 to 10% zone for men or 18 to 20% zone for women, you’ll start experiencing low energy, extreme hunger, and reduced libido.
Recommended Supplements
Next, let’s talk about a few supplements that are worth taking and that I actually recommend. The first is a protein powder. This isn’t required, but it can make hitting your total daily protein intake a lot easier. I’ll usually have a 30 to 50-gram protein shake immediately after training, not because there’s a super time-sensitive anabolic window, but simply because it’s an easy way for me to boost my daily total.
The second is creatine monohydrate. I take 5 grams every day. It doesn’t seem to matter when you take it, and you don’t need to cycle on and off. Decades of research have shown no negative side effects, and it’s one of the only legal supplements that actually offers a meaningful boost in both strength and muscle mass. It won’t make you look watery or bloated, but it doesn’t seem to work for about 25% of people, so you’ll need to try it out for yourself to see if you’re a responder.
The third is caffeine. Now, I personally take a pre-workout supplement for this, but if you don’t want to take pre-workout for whatever reason, coffee or caffeine tablets can get the job done. Caffeine does have a small thermogenic effect, and it does seem to burn some extra calories, but it isn’t clear if this translates to significantly more fat loss over the long term. But that’s not why I take it anyway. I take it because it helps me feel more focused and alert during training. You do develop a tolerance to caffeine, though, so I would suggest only taking it on days when you feel like you really need it or cycling off it for a few weeks once every few months.
If you want to have all the hard work of planning out your diet taken care of for you, I’d strongly encourage you to download my nutrition app, Macro Factor. It’s free for the first two weeks if you use the link below, so you have absolutely nothing to lose, and you can cancel anytime. Here are some of the transformations I’ve collected already from people using the app. This is my own personal transformation where I lost 30 pounds by using the app’s algorithms exclusively. I didn’t manually adjust a single thing; I just followed whatever the app told me.
The app is also extremely fast to learn and easy to use. We’ve always had a barcode scanner that allows you to instantly track the macros, but in some countries, the macros wouldn’t show up for every food. So we recently added a nutrition label scanner, so now you can track the macros on literally any food on the planet as long as it has a nutrition label. It’s an absolute game-changer. The app also has tons of really cool analytics features that’ll help you understand and visualize your journey over time and weekly check-ins to keep you accountable. There’s also a very active Facebook community and subreddit where you can ask questions and share your progress. So you can try it out for two weeks for free at the first link in the description box down below. Don’t forget to leave me a thumbs up if you enjoyed the video, subscribe if you haven’t already, and I’ll see you guys all here in the next one.
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