Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth - 2617: Only 5 Steps for a 6 Pack (Everybody Gets This Wrong)

Episode Date: June 12, 2025

Only 5 Steps for a 6 Pack (Everybody Gets This Wrong) Is there any body part more flooded with misinformation than abs? (1:21) Only 5 Steps for a 6 Pack (Everybody Gets This Wrong) #1 - Eat in a... calorie surplus. (5:40) #2 - You’re doing the exercises WRONG. (12:10) #3 - You’re doing TOO many reps. (20:21) #4 - Your workout program sucks! (24:15) #5 - Cardio sucks! Create a calorie deficit through diet. (26:44) Related Links/Products Mentioned Special Promotion: NO BS 6-Pack Formula 50% off! ** Code ABS50 at checkout ** Get your free Sample Pack with any “drink mix” purchase! Also, try the new LMNT Sparkling — a bold, 16-ounce can of sparkling electrolyte water: Visit DrinkLMNT.com/MindPump June Special: Shredded Summer Bundle or Bikini Bundle 50% off! ** Code JUNE50 at checkout ** Mind Pump # 2085: Abs & Core Masterclass Mind Pump Podcast – YouTube Mind Pump Free Resources  

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Starting point is 00:00:57 data rates may apply. No purchase required. Terms apply available at pockethose.com slash terms. If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. Mind pump with your hosts, Sal DeStefano, Adam Schafer, and Justin Andrews. You just found the most downloaded fitness, health, and entertainment podcast. This is mind pump. You are trying to get a six pack the wrong way. We're going to show you how to do it the right way. It really works.
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Starting point is 00:02:17 and use the code June 50 for the discount. Here comes the show. You want six pack abs. There's only five steps that you need to take to do this. By the way, everybody messes this up. I'm gonna run through them real quick and then we're gonna break them down. First off, you're not eating enough, believe it or not.
Starting point is 00:02:36 The second one, you're doing the wrong exercises, all the ones that suck. The next one, you're doing way too many reps to make a difference. The fourth one, you work out way too many reps to make a difference. The fourth one, your workout programming. The programming itself is garbage. And finally, stop doing cardio. All right, let's get into them.
Starting point is 00:02:53 I know. Thanks for helping me make these negative. To get people's. You know Justin's not here today, so I thought I'd be kind of a negative Nancy. We don't have happy Justin. Making everybody feel better. Positive guy.
Starting point is 00:03:07 Yeah. So when it comes to, I can't think of a body part, Adam, that, I mean, there's a lot of bad programming, bad exercise to make like across the board, but I can't think of a body part, just like a specific body part that is more just flooded with myths and misinformation than abs. It has to be. When you were writing this, I was trying to recall why even I was misled for as long as I was when it came to training this. I think the thing that comes to mind first to me was I remember, I remember this old adage of like, you use your core and your abs all day just to walk and to stand up. And so it needs to be trained differently.
Starting point is 00:03:54 So it's like, it needs to, like, you need to, it can take a beating because you're basically, and the same argument used to be made for calves. Calves and core had this similar approach to how to get one. And it was, you had to train them differently because you use your core all day long, you walk on your calves all day long. And so therefore they need a different approach towards building the muscle around it. And so, and I bought into that. I bought into this like high rep, high volume, burn like crazy, like tons and tons of repetitions is what it would take just to see any sort
Starting point is 00:04:30 of difference. No, so it is true that different muscles have... Different fiber types. Right, as an individual you have a general makeup of kind of fiber types that you have. By the way this is oversimplification because this can change through training quite a bit. But you have your slow twitch muscle fibers, your fast twitch muscle fibers, slow twitch are the endurance ones, fast twitch are the strength and power ones, the ones that grow, the ones that really build the most are the fast twitch ones. Now why is that? Because the bigger muscle fiber contracts harder and faster. You don't
Starting point is 00:05:03 necessarily need that for stamina and endurance. So slow twitch muscle fibers tend to not build as much. Now again, it's an oversimplification because through training you can actually make some fast twitch ones behave more like slow twitch and vice versa. But it is generally true. So if you want to build, then you train the fast twitch muscle fibers. This is why bodybuilders tend to do you know anywhere between one to twenty reps. You typically don't see them do 150 reps of exercise because it just doesn't just doesn't build muscles that build right. It gives you stamina and endurance but it doesn't really build. Now as far as
Starting point is 00:05:38 individual muscle groups are concerned it is true that if you were to take somebody's let's say soleus for example which is one of the muscles of the calf, it's a flat muscle that goes underneath the big gastroc muscle of the calf, that one has a higher percentage of slow twitch muscle fibers than let's say the lats might have. So that's generally true, but it doesn't matter. You still want to train the muscle fibers that build. You want the muscle fibers to build, so you train. So in other words, the principles that
Starting point is 00:06:07 apply to your pecs and your delts and whatever also apply to ab and core training. I personally think a lot of the misinformation around core training stems from the myth of spot reduction. That's what I think. That if you train an area, your body burns body fat from that area. That's what I think that that that if you train an area your body burns body fat from that area That's a good point and everybody wants to get leaner in the stomach area And so it turned into this like, you know
Starting point is 00:06:32 Do 50 million wraps type of deal train it differently because you want to get leaner in that area but spot reduction reduction is a myth That's not how it works. Yeah. No, I would agree. That's that's a good point Another one in to your first point that you're making that reminds me of this, right? So the first step to this is eating in a surplus. Yeah. You wanna build. But.
Starting point is 00:06:54 Trying to build. Another old adage was abs are made in the kitchen. Yeah. And so, okay, so which, which unpack that, what does that mean? Well, what it means is that we all have abs. That's right. Everybody, if you, even if you've never trained them.
Starting point is 00:07:12 If you peeled everybody's fat and skin off, there's abs. Yeah, they would have abs. Right. And so there's some truth to this, right? If every single person, even the most deconditioned, out of shape person who's never trained abs, were to get down to 3% body fat, they would have abs.
Starting point is 00:07:27 So there's a little bit of truth to that. But here's the problem is so many people decide that, okay, I wanna have these abs. And when they decide, the time they decide to do that, they start doing all these exercises that we're about to talk about that are wrong, while simultaneously cutting calories. Which flies right in the face of all the advice we give
Starting point is 00:07:48 to anybody trying to build any other muscle. So if somebody said, I wanna build my chest, my pecs, my anything like that, and they said to you, okay, I'm gonna eat less and do lots of reps to do that, you'd be like, no, that's a terrible strategy. Getting lean reveals the abs, but building the abs is like building any other muscle. And the more developed your abs are, this is a fact, the more visible
Starting point is 00:08:09 they're going to be at higher body fat percentages. I personally experienced this myself in my 20s. Now up until my 20s I'd been strength training. I was a personal trainer, gym manager, gym owner. I knew what I was doing but I did have some kind of not great exercise technique. I didn't understand that you built the abs like everything else. When I would get lean, I remember I would have to get sub 9% to really have a six pack. Then they only really appeared when I'd flex them. I remember I had friends that they'd walk around lean and their abs, they'd just have
Starting point is 00:08:44 six packs just relaxed. And I'm gonna think, oh man, how do they have six packs while they're relaxed? And then I realized like, their abs are bigger. They have more developed, just like an arm that has muscle will look leaner at a certain body fat percentage than an arm that has less muscle at the same body fat percentage.
Starting point is 00:09:00 You need to build the muscles of the core so that they're visible. If you want a six pack, you want abs that show, then you need to build the muscles of the core so that they're visible if you want a six pack you want abs that show Then you develop them and you can't build muscle without adequate nutrients. You can't do that in a calorie deficit Good luck Calorie deficit means you're eating less calories and you're burning Meaning your body has there are no leftover nutrients. No leftover proteins, no leftover carbohydrates, fats, no leftover calories to build these muscles.
Starting point is 00:09:29 So the first step in building a six pack is actually eating in a small surplus because we're going to try and build these abs. It ain't going to happen if you're not in a surplus. Which is so crazy to me because if we were to apply a similar goal to any other muscle group, that's obvious how we would approach it. That's right. Because the same point I made about everybody has abs, everybody has a chest muscle, everybody has shoulders, everybody has biceps, everybody has quads. If you were to peel everyone down to 3%,
Starting point is 00:09:58 it would reveal- They would have delts and biceps and all that. Yeah, they would have all those things. Yeah, it's been common knowledge forever that if you want to build a big chest, like I mean, you got to eat to build and you got to lift heavy weight and that's what it takes to do that. Yet for some reason, we haven't approached the core that way.
Starting point is 00:10:14 We tend to approach the core with this, hey, let's cut calories, let's do cardio, let's do lots of repetitions and that's what build abs. It's like, no, that's silly. It's no different than any other muscle. Unless you already have well-developed ab and core muscles, then you need to build them first. Now for me, again, this made a huge difference.
Starting point is 00:10:35 When I realized this and I trained them properly and ate in a slight surplus to give my body enough nutrients to start to build, my abs started to develop. I started to get a pump. I never got a pump on my abs before, like I get my biceps or my triceps or whatever. I started to get a pump when I would lift, and my abs grew to the point where even at 12% body fat now,
Starting point is 00:10:56 you can kind of see that I have a six pack. That never happened before, because my abs just weren't developed enough. So you first have to be in that surplus. And I'm not talking about a huge surplus everybody. So not going to crazy bulk, right? But you got to give your body adequate nutrients to have something leftover to build these muscles that you're about to try to build.
Starting point is 00:11:18 Otherwise you could do all the strength training exercises you want. What's going to happen is nothing. You're not going to build anything because you don't have enough nutrients. No, the, the, the really positive side to this, this tip is that if you've never really approached developing your abs like this, this is such an awesome strategy because it's so common to cut calories, do high reps, do, do all these things that don't really build that just help you lean out, but you've never approached a plan where you're like, Hey, you know what? I'm actually going to really try and develop my muscles.
Starting point is 00:11:49 I guess I've never really tried to build the core or build the abs in a surplus. Let me do that for a short period of time. You don't have to do it forever. You just do it for a short period of time. And then you go the other direction and boy, what a difference it makes. It makes a huge difference. And I'll say this too, and we see this all the time whenever somebody goes
Starting point is 00:12:07 in an appropriate deficit with good strength training, you might actually find yourself getting leaner in the process as well. Not because you're burning body fat, but because you're building muscle. So what I mean by that is, you know, if you have 20 pounds of body fat on your body and you're 200 pounds, that's 10% body fat.
Starting point is 00:12:23 If that person gained 10 pounds of muscle without gaining a single pound of body fat, their body fat percentage automatically went down because now it's a smaller percentage of their overall body weight. In other words, you could go through this process and yeah, I'm in a calorie surplus, but I'm not actually getting fatter.
Starting point is 00:12:39 Because I'm building muscle, I actually am leaner. And then of course, this is the big kicker, you'll look leaner in the midsection because you've developed the abs. In fact if I could snap my fingers right now and everybody listening whose body fat percentage isn't way out of control you take the average guy who's athletic or fit 13% the average female around 22 21% if I just developed their abs if I added you know like a pound of muscle to their core which is a ton by the way it's not going to happen let's just say you would just
Starting point is 00:13:06 build them, everybody would look much leaner in the midsection from having more developed abs. The next thing, I said you're doing the wrong exercises, or I'll put it differently, you're doing exercises wrong. This is super true with core exercises. So we need to understand the biomechanics of, let's just talk about the abs for a second. When you look at it, when you're looking at a side view of a human being, like if I were to stand up and stand sideways, the ab muscles
Starting point is 00:13:33 attach at the pelvis and at the rib cage, okay? And what they do is they flex my spine, my lumbar spine. they round my low back as they contract. Here's what they don't do. They don't flex me at my hips. In other words, it's not about sitting up and sitting forward. It's about rolling forward. This action right here works the abs and the mistake you, I see this, this is the most common mistake with ab exercise.
Starting point is 00:13:59 I'll see people doing leg raises and they're literally just lifting their legs. And if their legs are going up there But their spine is staying the same now They feel the the tightness and the burn in the core because the core's stabilizing But they're not working their abs in a full range of motion Essentially making the exercise 90% less effective This is true for all ab all ab exercises if you're trying to train a full range of motion. They are spinal extension and flexion. Extension and flexion. So think of the low
Starting point is 00:14:32 back extending and then flexing, not the hips. That's the big mistake. I don't know if you intentionally ordered them this way, but I think that of all the things that we're going to cover, these first two that we talk about are like the low-hanging fruit. Meaning, very few people have actually attempted to build their core and abs in a calorie surplus. So that's obvious. Go that direction if you've never done that. The second thing and probably the most common that I dealt with with training clients was just poor technique, including myself too. I mean, the most common stuff you see are these like kind of full lever sit ups or crunches. And you said it already, probably the best cue that was ever taught to me that like unlocked like, oh,
Starting point is 00:15:16 this is what I'm doing wrong, was the thinking of like, anyone seen a skeleton before and knows what kind of like the what the spine looks spine looks like. We've all seen that. When you're doing any ab exercise, you're thinking of rolling the spine up versus contracting it, bending it over, folding it. You're trying to roll each individual vertebrae. As I do any of those exercises, I'm always thinking of the vertebrae and thinking about I'm trying to move each and every one of them, roll them up individually.
Starting point is 00:15:48 And I think that had helped me out, go, oh, okay. Otherwise, and this is common in a lot of other exercise, but maybe the most in the abs, is you have these other muscles that dominate or take over, like the hip flexors. Oh yeah. Most people, and where this can be deceiving is, yeah, the abs work a little bit.
Starting point is 00:16:06 It's kind of, it reminds me of what, when we talk about like sleepy butt syndrome with people, they can't build their butts, right? Like if you do a squat, if you do a full range of motion squat, your glutes do get worked, but there is a way that people do it where they feel mostly in their quads and they can't develop their butt. And that's because they're, they're not engaging the proper muscles in it. But you can still perform the exercise and feel maybe a little bit there.
Starting point is 00:16:28 Abs are similar this way where you'll do some of it and it's like, oh I feel a little bit of burn there so then you assume like, oh it must be working. The most common muscle that people will work directly whenever trying to do ab exercises, especially things like your feet are anchored sit ups or leg raises. Both great exercises when done properly, both often done improperly.
Starting point is 00:16:49 The muscles you tend to be working specifically are the psoas muscle, the iliopsoas muscle. This is a hip flexor that attaches at the femur, goes through the body, attaches at the lower back of the spine. Then if you do ab exercises and it hurts your low back, it's cause it's a psoas. Your abs do not attach anywhere near the spine. Now, unless you have a slip disc or some injury, if you do them, you're like, Oh my God, my back gets real tight.
Starting point is 00:17:15 The tightness is your psoas muscle. The psoas is what you're working and your abs are just stabilizing. That's all they're doing. They're not working through a full range of motion. So if I were to use an example of like I'll use these two bottles right here. The bottom being your legs, the top one being your body. This right here is hip flexors. Abs would be bending here at the bottle. That's where you're gonna get the abs involved. So when you do a leg raise even, what you're doing is you're trying to roll your pelvis up. You're not just trying to lift the legs. By the way, a real leg raise done properly,
Starting point is 00:17:48 the way I'm saying where you take the pelvis and rotate it up, very hard. Very hard. Very hard. Only people with the strongest actual ab muscles who are super strong can do these properly. Nine out of 10 times, anybody doing this gym does it wrong and can't do it right
Starting point is 00:18:04 because it's such a long lever of lifting your legs, they're just not strong enough. This is why I actually don't like that exercise. Not because I don't think it's incredible and can build abs and it's especially because it is like a strength exercise for abs. So I do think it could be considered one of the best movements. The problem is I rarely see this done right. When I see people in the gym, in the assisted or the hanging, and they're keeping their- It's so as lift.
Starting point is 00:18:31 It is straight and it just hip flexor, hip flexor, all day long. And again, they might, even if the people have swinging all the way up to the toes, to the top of the bar, feel a little bit of the abs, the abs get worked in there, or maybe on the deceleration coming down, they feel a little bit of their abs engage. And so they have this connection of on the deceleration coming down, they feel a little bit of their abs engage. And so they have this connection of like, Oh, I kind of feel it in there.
Starting point is 00:18:48 Or it burns. Yeah. Or it burns, but it's still not the primary mover. And if it's not the primary mover, it's not what's going to get the biggest bang for your buck doing that movement. So I always like doing simpler movements until the client really understands how to articulate the spine and roll it up. Then we can start to progress into some of these more advanced movements that are more challenging. But if you go directly
Starting point is 00:19:08 for what people argue and say are the best ab exercises, but then you don't use the... Just like, again, glutes are one of the best ways to build your glutes is good squatting. But if you squat and use primarily quads, it no longer becomes one of the best movements for it. So it has to be done proper in order for it to be the best exercise. Leg raises can be one of the best exercises for your abs, but when it's not done properly, it no longer is. No, they belong, leg raises belong to people with really strong ab muscles. And by the way, when you have really strong ab muscles and you do this right, you're doing
Starting point is 00:19:39 like six to eight reps. I do, single numbers. It's a very, if you do this really slow Like you said roll all the way up keep that long level my god super hard Yes, super hard one of my favorite ways to demonstrate this with people back in the day when I was in gyms would be a Physio ball crunch you would see people do a million reps on this They're just doing reps and then I'd say okay Here's what we're gonna do lay back on the physio ball put your low back on the top of it
Starting point is 00:20:04 Push your hips up and then keep that. You gotta push, you gotta lock your hips into place. That's what we're gonna do to keep you from doing a hip flexor crunch. And then let your low back wrap around the ball, and then crunch over the ball. Suddenly, Mrs. Johnson, who's doing 35 reps at a time, can do four.
Starting point is 00:20:20 Four proper reps, and her abs are lit up because she was doing it right. Not to get off track a little bit But just a little history for the audience that doesn't know this like you actually wrote Six-pack abs before we ever even met. Yeah, you do you remember? What was the primary driver of that when you did that? Like was it was you were you just like either one just figuring this out or, or were you just starting to see great results personally, or what made you do that?
Starting point is 00:20:47 It was my personal going from being able to get lean before and not having these abs that really stuck out that I really wanted, to figuring it out, and suddenly my abs became my best body part, like within a few months, and I was like, that's because I was doing it really the wrong way. Now we're all, by the way, we're talking about the abs, but also talk about the obliques.
Starting point is 00:21:07 This one's a little bit more simple, but the obliques rotate you at your trunk, at your lumbar spine. So if you want to train the obliques properly, it's twisting, uh, with rotation. But technique is everything. Like it is with every body part. Uh, next up you're doing way too many reps. Way too many reps. Again, I think this stems from the the spot reduction myth where it's like I want to get rid of my belly
Starting point is 00:21:31 So let me do 5 000 reps because it burns and that burn must mean i'm burning fat from that area Your body doesn't spot reduce your body burns body fat from wherever it wants which is determined by your genetics And your hormones. Okay? Mostly genetics. So in other words, the first place you store body fat tends to be the last place that you lose it. Now if your hormone profile changes as you age, let's say you're a man, your testosterone levels go low and your estrogen goes high, you may notice changes in where you store body fat. Same thing for women. Or more belly fat, especially visceral, could be a result of too much stress or insulin
Starting point is 00:22:09 resistance, that type of stuff. But nonetheless you can't spot reduce, so I can't make my core leaner by doing lots of core exercises. So that's where I think this came from. Super high reps just don't build muscle. You don't do this anywhere. The highest reps just don't build muscle. You don't do this anywhere. The highest reps that you probably want to do with good technique and good form with resistance is probably around 20, maybe 25. This is true for every body part. Now yes you could go a little higher but then this starts to mess with fatigue and I've never really seen people get great
Starting point is 00:22:41 results from this. Typically the best rep range to build muscle are the lower rep ranges. Five, six, eight, ten, twelve, right around there. Just like it is for your biceps, just like it is for your glutes, same thing for your core. So that means make the exercise hard and if you're strong, use resistance. Now this is one of my favorite tips to help people with because even if you do train abs and even if you do train them properly and work them right, this tends to be the thing that you neglect. And if you've been listening to this podcast for long enough, you've heard us talk about
Starting point is 00:23:14 the power of novelty when you've done a stimulus or you do something you've never done before, how it's like you get those newbie gains again. So this is even great for the advanced lifter. And for some reason, I don't know if it was our generation, what I remember, I do remember, as a young adult, like the musicians that were that talk to had great abs and great bodies that were interviewed, always talked about, I do 1000 sit ups a day. It's always this like crazy
Starting point is 00:23:39 number. Everybody was trying to accomplish like, Oh, is that all at once? Or they break them up? And then everybody had these strategies to get to 1000 sit ups, oh, is that all it wants or they break them up? And then everybody had these strategies to get to a thousand sit-ups a day, like that was what was gonna do it. And so there became this kind of this culture around abs being lots of supersets, lots of reps, and it was, they needed this consistent daily beating to get to the way you can see that way.
Starting point is 00:24:00 And so everybody was trying to see how many they could do in a day when it's like, have you ever thought about doing like five, but really heavy and controlled? And if you're like what? Yeah, that just, it's not something anybody was talking about or really doing back in the day or even I feel like today.
Starting point is 00:24:15 And so even if you're listening and you think you've got good form and technique, you do train your abs frequently. Like when was the last time you did a traditional five by five type of routine for your abs and do that if you haven't done that do it by the way this works incredible for the calves too this was a big unlock for me for building my calves was this whole time i was treating my abs and my calves the same way it was just lots and lots of reps lots and lots of volume never once did i
Starting point is 00:24:41 think like oh i should lift heavy like i do every other muscle group and sure as shit when I started doing that they both really built. That's right and so you can pick any core, any ab exercise, pick one that's appropriate because if you go heavy with that technique there is a chance you'll hurt yourself like there's with any exercise. So like physical ball crunches done properly, properly for most people will put you in this rep range. If you're really strong, then you're looking at reverse crunches on an incline or leg raises for the most strong. For these low rep ab building exercises, again that make the abs pop out and stick out. Next up is the workout programming typically sucks.
Starting point is 00:25:19 Now the data on this is pretty clear. Body parts tend to develop best when you train them between two to three days a week. Now that doesn't mean, and this is again, based on experience that you're doing the same thing three days a week. What I have found for the core, because the core has a lot of function as well. Now every muscle has function. Okay. But the core is especially important.
Starting point is 00:25:40 Like if you, you need a good stable good stable core with good function to prevent the most common injury which is low back injury especially when you're doing squats and deadlifts and overhead presses and that kind of stuff. So there is a method that will give you that functionality and stability but also develop the aesthetics that you're looking for and this is typically what it looks like. Workout one looks like what we're talking about. You're doing the lower reps, it's heavy, it's slow, I'm building.
Starting point is 00:26:06 Workout two, which is maybe two days later, it's a little bit lighter, I'm getting more of a pump, I'm not training with so much intensity. And then workout three is where I'm doing stabilization. This is where you're doing your things like planks, counter rotation. Like core stuff. Yeah, where you're just trying to keep your core stable
Starting point is 00:26:23 and strong in an isometric position because that's very valuable when you do things like squats and deadlifts and overhead presses. To add to your programming sucks, a lot of times, and I find, I keep drawing this back to the calves because I feel like these are two areas that are really common when it comes to the programming. It's just a lack of prioritizing it. It tends to be an afterthought. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:26:46 Both abs and calves, even though people say they want them so bad, they tend just not to prioritize them. They tend to focus on all these other muscle groups, and so therefore they get the attention. And I just truly believe that you'll get what you focus on, and if you don't focus on those things or make it a priority to program it specifically the way you do everything else, you're going to get those types of results. And so if you treat it as this afterthought of, oh yeah, I'll do a set of abs at the end
Starting point is 00:27:13 of this workout, like here and there, you'll get that type of results from it. But if you program it the same way you approach the way you program squats and deadlifts or any other important movement in your training routine, you will see those types of results for it. Just like what you just said, you have a very specific day based on strength, you have a day that's based on hypertrophy, then you have this isometric type of day and you make sure that you do that three times a week every week and you track your form and your technique matters, eating in a surplus to build matters, all that stuff matter. If you do all those things, you will build abs.
Starting point is 00:27:44 That's right. Now the last step is what you do last because you're trying to reveal what you've built. So this step is later on. Now I said cardio sucks for this and here's what I mean by that. There's nothing wrong with cardio. Okay. Great way to build endurance. You can burn some extra calories, blah, blah, blah. But to create a calorie deficit, it's not a great approach. The body adapts very quickly to cardio. Some of the ways it adapts to too much cardio is by pairing muscle down. Not a good thing when you're trying to have an aesthetic looking body, if that's your goal, unless you want endurance, which is totally fine, but it's better
Starting point is 00:28:16 to create a calorie deficit through diet. Okay. So now that you want to reveal the abs, now you put yourself in a small deficit, typically three to 600 calories below what you were eating to maintain, or reveal the abs, now you put yourself in a small deficit, typically three to 600 calories below what you were eating to maintain or maybe a little more than what you were eating to build, stay in there consistently, eat a high protein diet, and then the abs eventually
Starting point is 00:28:37 will reveal themselves and you'll have that six-pack. I like to give my clients very specific, easy, generic things for them to follow. So we talked about the very beginning of this was eating in a surplus. So that's step one, right? We have to go build these apps. And I want to do that with them for at least six to eight weeks. Six to eight weeks, I'm going to make sure that we are in a three to 500 minimum calorie
Starting point is 00:29:00 surplus every day for the six to eight weeks of doing all the things that we talked about. Now let's say you've done a good job of that. Okay, I've done that for eight weeks. I've definitely built some muscle. Now I want to really see these abs. Now I'm going to go into a cut or I'm going to lean out. One meal falls off. That's it. Just drop. If you did a good job of adding calories to the diet, to get to this place where you're in a surplus, an easy way to cut it is just to cut one meal and cut one meal for the next 68 weeks after that and watch what happens. If you spent 68 weeks building and then 68 weeks cutting and the way you've cut or the way you've built is probably adding about a meal or so 300 to 500 calories. The way you cut it is by cutting out that three to 500 calories. That's going to do that. If you want to add anything more, walking. Walk, move more. That'll help create a greater calorie deficit. Not that
Starting point is 00:29:49 cardio is bad. You can. You can do that if you want to, but it's not the answer to this. It's literally do it through nutrition, do it through your diet. If you can get some extra activity here and there, that can help speed up the process. But then for the next six to eight weeks, you're cutting out that meal. Watch what you reveal. Perfect. Look, if you like the show, find us on Instagram you can find Adam at MindPumpAdam and you can find me at MindPumpDestep. Thank you for listening to MindPump. If your goal is to build and shape your body, dramatically improve your health and energy and maximize your overall performance check out our discounted RGB Super Bundle at mindpumpmedia.com. The RGB Super Bundle includes maps anabolic,
Starting point is 00:30:27 maps performance, and maps aesthetic. Nine months of phased expert exercise programming designed by Sal, Adam, and Justin to systematically transform the way your body looks, feels, and performs. With detailed workout blueprints and over 200 videos, the RGB Super Bundle is like having Sal, Adam and Justin as your own personal trainers, but at a fraction of the price.
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