Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth - 2887: Why Nobody Has the Abs They Want (And It's Not Body Fat)

Episode Date: June 25, 2026

In this episode the guys break down how not to train your abs, covering the five biggest mistakes that keep people from ever seeing results from their core training. They cover why high reps are the wrong approach, how most people are using their hip flexors instead of their abs without realizing it, why short range of motion leaves gains on the table, why rest periods matter just as much for abs as any other muscle, and why avoiding obliques is one of the worst ideas in fitness. Sal shares how switching to resistance training for his abs within 60 days made them one of his best body parts.   No BS 6-Pack Formula:  https://nobs6pack.com Code: 6PACK for 50% off. Full two phase ab building system with video demos by Sal. $28.50 after discount. 30 day money back guarantee.   SPONSORS Super Patch:  https://mindpump.superpatch.com No code needed. Use the URL for $30 off. Drug free wearable neurotechnology patch backed by over a dozen peer reviewed studies. Supports sleep, focus, energy, mobility, recovery and stress management.   LINKS Mind Pump Store:  https://mindpumpstore.com Maps Fitness Products:  https://mapsfitnessproducts.com Instagram: @mindpumpmedia   SPOTIFY TIMESTAMPS 0:00 - Intro 2:16 - How not to train your abs — the mistakes everyone makes 3:44 - Mistake #1: High reps — why this builds stamina not muscle 8:51 - Mistake #2: Flexing at the hips instead of the lumbar spine 14:28 - Mistake #3: Short range of motion and what a full range actually looks like 17:22 - Mistake #4: No rest between sets — why circuits kill your ab gains 19:38 - Mistake #5: Avoiding obliques — why this logic is completely backwards 22:57 - No BS 6-Pack Formula — the program designed to fix all of this  

If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. Mind Pump. Mind Pump with your hosts. Sal DeStefano, Adam Schaefer, and Justin Andrews. You just found the most downloaded fitness, health, and entertainment podcast. This is Mind Pump. Today, we're talking about how not to train your abs. Everybody wants a nice midsection.

They want a six-pack. And almost everybody trains it wrong. We break it down and tell you how to do it the right way. By the way, we have a program that's designed to help you develop a six-pack to give you an incredible midsection. It's the most effective mid-section training program around. It's the most effective program to get a six-pack. It's a relaunch. It's been revamped.

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All right, real quick, if you love us like we love you, why not show it by rocking one of our shirts, hats, mugs, or training gear over at mindpump store.com. I'm talking right now, hit pause, head on over to mindpump store.com. That's it. Enjoy the rest of the show. All right, look, you want a nice looking midsection.

You want a six-pack. You want to look trim. You're doing it all wrong. We're talking about how not to train your abs. These are mistakes everybody makes. This is why nobody has nice-looking abs. Let's get too. Stop messing it out.

Now not to, we're going to talk about the big mistakes that everybody makes when training their abs. And for some reason, we view the abs or the core as if it's some different kind of muscle that responds differently to exercise. And we got to train it in a particular way. We don't really apply this to any other body parts. And then people wonder why they don't get great results when training their core. You have the best pulse on commercial gyms because you go to two of them pretty regularly. Is this still really Rampant problem?

It's still the way it is. It has not changed. When I see people training their abs or their core in commercial gyms, it looks like what we're about to talk about. It has not changed in 20 years. People still haven't figured it out. And here's the good news, you guys. The good news is if you train them the right way,

the results you get with your abs is phenomenal. And I mean exceptional. Like 30 to 60 days, you see. massive changes in how your abs look if you just train them the right way. So I'll start with the first thing. Somehow a long time ago, the idea was put into our minds that you need to train your abs with really, really high reps. Yeah.

Like lots and lots and lots of reps. And I think it may stem from the false idea that feeling the burn burns body fat maybe from an area is where I'm guessing, you know, the whole idea of spot. I feel like a lot of those like at home videos like the Jane Fonda's and the Jazzercise and a lot of the prescription there was always just like so many reps and it was like that was sort of what you'd see in the gyms. It just kind of trickled in the gyms and everybody thought that you know you have to do at least 100 to 200 crunches. I wish I remember where I went wrong and where I whether it was a magazine or where I read it but I remember

reading something on the difference between fast twitch and slow twitch fibers and how you train them. That's what I remember. And the abs and the calves were similar in that area. And that they needed this higher amount of volume in order to get them to build and grow. And so that's where it came. And I wish I remember where I got that. Do you remember reading that or hearing that?

Yeah, like you hear like they recover faster than all the other muscles. I've heard that one too. So slow twitch muscle fiber. This is a real gross oversimplification. It's more complex than this. Right. And it's individualized and they can change. Yeah, like faster.

It is very nuanced. But generally speaking. Generally speaking, slow twitch muscle fibers are the muscle fibers that produce endurance. They have lots of endurance. They don't have a lot of capacity for hypertrophy or growth. Fast twitch muscle fibers generate lots of power and strength. And these are the ones that grow. This is why, if you want to build your growth,

glutes or you want to build your arms or your chest or your back, you train heavy. Yeah. This is what strength training is. You're anaerobic. Nobody built nice looking glutes doing 150 reps. People know this now, by the way, because they used to train glutes this way as well. Now women figure this out. Like, I got to get really strong at squats and hip thrust.

That'll make my glutes grow. We've known this for other body parts. Nobody sits in the gym who wants to develop a physique and does 100 reps of all these different exercises, you know, we train the lower rep ranges, right? Five reps, up to maybe 15 reps, maybe 20 reps at the top. But you're training with resistance and you're training heavy. This is what causes muscle fibers to grow. Do you want your ab muscle fibers to grow or hypertrophy? Yes. This is what makes them stick out. This is what gives you abs. Now, you, if you, you can definitely get lean enough, ultra lean to where you see them because there's no body fat on them. But,

here's the beauty of building your abs. They become more visible at higher body fat percentages. This is like if you picture a guy at, let's say, 16% body fat with little muscle on his arms versus a guy at 16% body fat with a lot of muscle on his arms, the lot of muscle guy, his arms look far more defined. Same body fat percentage, but you could see tricep and bicep. Why? Because there's muscle underneath.

Same thing for a woman. A woman at 27% body fat with no muscle, she looks flabby. 27% with muscle, curve, and shape. It's the muscle that accomplishes that look. And the way you do that is with reps that you would train other body parts with. You know, five reps up to maybe 20 at the most, not 50, 60, 100 reps.

That's going to give you stamina and endurance. There's nothing wrong with that if that's what you want. But if you want your apps to pop, you want to see them, train the low rep ranges. You've got to train them that way. I mean, I just brought that up because I made this similar. and I know this is about abs, but I find that this is super common with calves too.

And I made that same mistake. Like I did these, you know, short pumping reps on the seed of calf raises where you're rocking the thing up and down like 15, 20 reps or you're super setting it like crazy. And that was the way I trained calves. And the same goes for how I trained abs.

It was like this bicycle abs into full levers. Like you're just doing tons of stuff for it. And they're burning and they're getting pumped. And you're like, oh, this is the way to train them. Never once did I think to do slow, controlled, full range of calf raises or slow. Heavy weight. Yeah, with heavy weight.

And it wasn't until I did that with my calves. Did the light bulb go off for my abs? And I went, oh, my God, like, this was a huge unlock. This, this one thing for me, made it so that, you know, I'd have to get down to like 9% body fat to have like a six-pack. But even then I'd have to flex to kind of see it. And I was always envious of the, I'd see guys who they could just walk on relaxed with six-pack abs. And I was leaner than they would,

than they were. It wasn't until I started to train them for strength. And I'm not exaggerating, everybody. I want people to know this. It took me 60 days. It was like within, now I'd always train my abs. I just trained them with a million reps.

When I went to resistance within 60 days, boom. Suddenly my abs became one of my best body parts because they built them. Yeah. So train them in the lower rep range like you would with other body parts. And I wouldn't, I mean, you could maybe you could put a number on it or I'm sure this is a bit of an overgenitalization, but I would say you can carry yourself at two to three percent higher body fat and see

them. 100%. So whatever it takes you to get down to to see your abs now, if you've never trained them like this before, you now can carry yourself at two to three percent higher body fat and you got abs. And you have abs. Totally. Next up, this is a big mistake in technique is that people, when they see an exercise, that's for

abs, they think if the body's folding, if the knees are coming up or the legs are coming up or the upper body's coming up, you're working your abs. Yeah. That's not true. The abdominal muscles flex the lumbar spine. So if you look at a body, look at the rib cage, look at the bottom of the rib cage and the pelvis. This is where the abs attach. It's the bottom of the rib cage and the pelvis. When the abs contract, they bring the rib cage closer to the pelvis. What they don't do is flex the hips. So me bringing my leg up without rotating my hips because the rotating of my hips is what gets my abs contract. If I just bring my legs up, it's hip flexors. You see this most commonly in leg raises.

I see people like this all the time in the gym. When they're doing leg raises and they've got their arms on the brace and they're lifting their legs back and forth and there's no ab contraction. There's ab stabilization. Your abs are stabilizing your spine, but it's all hip flexors. and this is why I see middle-aged people being able to do 30 reps of leg raises. If I go over there and correct their form, they'll be able to do maybe four proper reps because they're actually rolling and flexing at the lumbar

and getting a full range of motion of the abs or working the abs the way they're supposed to work. Do you guys remember the name of some good YouTube videos that we did on Mind Pump TV or related to this? Because this one's really hard to articulate on a podcast to get someone to understand. because to the untrained eye, Hit Flex for Deactivator Crunch.

Is that one with the names? Maybe Doug can look up. That's one video where I break it down. And the reason why I bring that up is because we can sit here talk about it on the podcast all day. But this is one of those things I'd have to get in with a client and like almost touch them and move them. Yeah, because to the untrained eye,

you see someone do knee ups or leg raises or any other crunch and it looks the same. They might look at it and go. Now, obviously to your eye, anybody, trained eye, we can see it, right? You can see the way they're moving. But the average person, the movement looks the same. What it looks like is if you're, imagine somebody standing straight up and then doing a waiter's bow with real tall posture versus somebody who's hunching down and rolling down.

That's the second one right there. Hip, hip flexer deactivators, mind pump TV. So go to that video and we cue it really well. That's right. So again, if I'm bending over, but I'm rolling, I'm rounding my low. back, that would be my abs, versus bending over at the hips like a, like you would see a waiter do with what's known as a waiter bow. So the abs do not flex your body at the hips.

They flex the lumbar spine, which is above the hips. So if you did a leg raise and you were trying to work your abs, the way you would lift your legs up would be through tilting the pelvis up. It would not be through flexing the hips. And let me tell you something. Way hard. Way different. Way.

Way harder. Very different. Most people can bring their knees up with their hip flexors. Most people cannot roll their hips off the back of the bench. One thing about, well, and I went through like a brief, you know, period where I was trying to learn a lot of gymnastic moves. And they had this one move, and it was called the ball up. And it literally deliberately would teach you that, like how to literally roll your hips up into position as opposed to, you know, really like lifting your legs up and driving all that with your hip flexors. So you had to really stay tight and then push those hips.

hips and roll them into your body. You know what I used to do with my clients as one of our first, one of the first exercises to teach them how to do this was a reverse crunch. A reverse crunch, you know, where they're holding on the bench and rolling their hips off the bed. It's your app. No, I think this is the best regression to this is laying flat on the floor first and teaching them how to roll up like Justin's describing and then giving them a little bit of an incline, a little more of an incline, and you just keep working the way until they can really figure out how to articulate the spine like that and roll it up. And then you get, now that light bulb kind of goes off for them. And then now you can put them in like a Roman chair or something like that.

Totally. Because going right to a Roman chair and then trying to cue somebody how not to use their hip flexors, it's just like, which is why I think we've talked about this a long time ago, but how much we, I don't like that exercise. I don't like leg raises. Like, unless you're a really advanced person, you just knows can get misused. Yeah. It's a long lever, difficult exercise. I just never, I, I never trained my clients. Because there were so many other ab exercises that I wanted them to get perfect before they got to that. It's like, that's a really advanced movement.

Especially when you see, and it's so popular. Remember there there was a trend for a while there. It's not as popular now, but, man, everybody used to have their. Oh, the wind. Do the windchel wiper. Yes, and the straps. They would bring the straps to the gym. Step their way up in the air.

Yeah. Just doing all this hip flexer stuff. And it's just like, man, you just, you put that person. same person on just an incline, which is easier, and asked them to roll up 10 times, perfect, and you scorched their abs. Next is a short range of motion. So when you're doing exercises on the floor and you lay all the way flat, that's actually not a full range of motion for your abs.

A physio ball actually provides a full range of motion because you have that forward crunch, but then when you lay back and then you wrap your back around the ball, now you've got that arch in your back, you're stretching your abs. you're getting a very full range of motion. I'm going to say this right now. If you do a proper sit-up on a physio ball, which nobody does, nobody does this right. When I see people on a physical ball and they throw reps around like crazy. Oh, I know.

And I used to do this in gyms. When I would manage gyms, I'd come over, I'd help people. And the same person who could do 50 reps on the physical ball could barely do three. Full range of motion? Yeah. It's so different. You remember those infomercials with the bender ball? Yeah.

It's so funny because, I mean, what they're trying to highlight is like the real range of motion, and you could get into with that and then draw, you know, that last bit that everybody was missing. Do we program any on the video ball where you put your feet up on the wall? No. We didn't do that, huh? Oh, I love doing them like that.

I love doing it because it's almost like your hip flexor deactivator where you elevate like that. And so what I would tell people to do is push their hips up, you know. Tell them to push their hips up, activate their glutes, because that tends to deactivate the hip flexors. Yeah. And then crunch. In fact, I'm working with a buddy of mine now.

I'm actually training somebody on a relatively regular basis. And we did some of these crunches on the, And he's like, man, I do sit-ups. He's like, I can't believe how these feel. Oh, yeah. And it's really just because I'm taking him through that full range of motion. And you're taking the hip flexer completely out. And we're taking the hip flexes.

Because even people, this is also why this is a difficult to articulate on a podcast is because there's somebody listening right now who does ab exercises and goes, oh, I fill it in my abs. This isn't me. Yes. And you are using some of your abs. Your abs are incorporated. They're stabilizing.

They're in part of the range of motion there. So you're also. still using a lot of your hip flexors and completely taking the hip flexor out and isolating all the way down to the abs, huge difference. No, when you're... When you're flexing...

It's like the difference of taking somebody who is, you know, doing bicep curl strict versus swinging your arms in a bicep curl. Yes. You know what I'm saying? It's like, you're definitely going to feel... Yeah, I mean, if you rock your swing your arms

and dumbbell curls, I mean, I can do 80-pound dumbbells. You know what I'm saying? But make me do that with strict form and 40s become really heavy and difficult. Similar. Or like, yeah, if you're, if you're flexing at the hip flexors, you're bringing your legs up, your abs have to stabilize. They do have to stabilize your lumbar spine in order to allow your hip flexors to do the work.

So you will feel fatigue and tired, but you're essentially doing a long asymmetric. And if you want hypertrophy, I mean, everybody knows this, but all the studies show this. And this is again, if you're listening to this, you know this. How do you make a muscle build? You train it through a full range of motion. That's the best way to make it build. Partial range of motion. They'll build less.

No range of motion. Extension. Builds even less. Full extension, full contraction. And so you want that full range of motion. And you'll see the results will explode if you've never done this before. Next up is they don't rest between sets. Almost everybody does abs in a circuit.

Yeah. So it's like abs, obliques, you know, plank, back to, you know, back to this, back to that, back to bicycles. Because they're looking for a lot of burn. I think a lot of our programming, now that I think about it, a lot of our ab and core training programming came from group. classes. I think you mentioned it earlier, the old workout videos. Yeah.

Yeah, I honestly feel like that was the root of it all because everybody in these classes would always just like, I mean, it was lots and lots of reps so the structure could go around and try and cue them, but it was like, yeah, I think they just adopted it for it.

Well, isn't that, I mean, one of the most famous at-home videos is the six-minute apps, right? I mean, that's what that, that's,

it's like literally just a six-minute non, non-steam. pop, you know, series of all kinds of ab exercises with no rest. And fatigue is, you know, the biggest priority, right, with a lot of those programming. So it's like to get the abs to feel like it's fatigue, it's like, we got a hammering. And I think that was why that this got so popular is, listen, if you've never changed your abs before and all of a sudden you get, you train six minutes straight of abs, like you're going to see.

Yeah, you'll feel it. You'll see it. You'll see it. You'll see some change. You know what I'm saying? You'll get some benefits from it. But just like if you were to only do something like that with any other muscle, like you said, you would adapt to get used to it, not see any more.

Oh yeah, you don't build muscle. So what makes strength training, strength training, you know, you've got weights, you've got resistance, you've got reps, but it's the rest periods. Yeah. It's the rest periods that makes strength training, strength training. You have to rest in between sets because we're trying to use an energy system that produces muscle growth or hypertrophy. We're trying to keep it anaerobic.

If we go set to set to set to set, it becomes glycolytic, which is fine, it becomes aerobic. You get endurance. If that's what you want, that's great. But you're not going to build muscle. It's like long distance runners. The reason why long distance runners don't have muscular legs, they just don't. They have skinny legs.

Why? They've got lots of stamina. Big muscular legs do not produce lots of stamina. They require too much energy efficient. Too much energy. They're strong. They don't have tons of endurance. So if you want endurance, then go for it.

But if you want abs and obliques and the core that can show, then you want to rest in between sets and you're a training like you do other body parts. And then finally, this one is really annoying to me. Yeah. is avoiding obliques. Why? Because someone... Tringing the waist. Someone said, I don't want to grow my waist.

I don't want to build the sides of my waist. I got to keep my waist small. This is stupid. This is really done. Look, first of all, you're not going to add inches to your waist because you're building your obliques. But let me just tell you this.

If you added a quarter inch to your waist of pure oblique muscle, if I looked at you from the front and from the side, your waist is going to look amazing. It's going to look better. It's going to look stronger. It's going to look tighter. It's going to look more defined.

Not to make. mention the functionality. Your obliques are so important. So protective. For poor stability to stabilize your lumbar spine, to produce movement, to produce locomotion, running, walking to keep you stable, to make sure you don't hurt your back. Like, avoiding oblique training is like, you might as well be signing up for back injury. I definitely blame the men's physique in women's bikini for this one.

I think, I mean, whether that was true before that category, those categories came out or not, they definitely made it worse. Like that, that became a point that coaches would tell these clients is, we want this tiny waste. And so waste trainers became popular again. And it became a thing not to train your obliques, to eliminate exercises like deadlifts because they could build your obliate.

Like, I mean, it became, that's how big it came. You started losing great movements and avoiding that. You might as well bring back a fainting couch while you're at it. Dude. It was such a terrible idea Because to your point, even if it made your waist an inch wider, it made it look better.

Yeah. Even on state, I always thought that was so interesting that it became this thing that it came popular even on for stage presence. It's like it looks better. It doesn't look like you have, you don't get like a boxy, no shape to it.

It's this complete shape that looks better. It's only make your abs. It makes your abs look more pronounced. It creates more that V. below your abdominal. It's like, why would you? Oblakes on a man and a woman look phenomenal.

I mean, you ask somebody from the opposite sex. Like a woman well-developed midsection and obliques look incredible. And women would say, you know what's funny about this, if you look at ancient sculptures, Greek and Roman sculptures of like Hercules

or they would depict maybe an athlete, they were basing it off of what they saw on high-performing athletes. And if you look at those sculptures, who's the strongest? really interesting. They all have really muscular obliques. If you look at a picture of a sculpture of Hercules, one thing that stands out is these really strong looking obliques. Obliques give you power. It reminds me of when I used to get my female clients who didn't want to train legs because they didn't

want, you know, bigger legs. Bigger legs. It's crazy. And it's like more muscular legs, even if they're thicker inchwise and fill out your jeans more, looks better. Then just an inch smaller, no muscle. It's like it looks way. better to have that because it's defined. It looks sculpted. It looks shaped. It looks firmer. It's got better shape to it. Yeah. That's right. But it's this, I think it's some of that. It's like, oh, my waist is this big. Last thing I want to do is add another inch of it. But what you don't know. Yeah, it looks so much better. No, go for it. Look, we have a program for training your core. It's only for abs and obliques. And it's designed to build those muscles so they show. So you can see them. It's a three-month program. You will see more definition in your midsection. You're

your abs will be stronger than ever and so will your obliques and it's 50% off. You can actually get it for $28.50.50. Go to no BS6.com. So that's no BS. Number six pack. com. Use the code six pack. So that's number six pack.

That'll give you 50% off. That makes it only $28. And 50 cents. You got to go check it out. You can also find us on Instagram. It's Mind Pump Media. Thank you for listening to Mind Pump. 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 Superbundle at Mind Pumpmedia.com. The RGB Superbundle includes MAPS Anabolic, 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 Superbundle is like having Sal Adam and Justin as your own personal trainers, but at a fraction of the price. The RGB Superbundle has a full 30-day money-back guarantee, and you can get it now plus other valuable free resources at Mindpumpmedia.com. If you enjoy this show, please share the love by leaving us a five-star rating and review on iTunes, and by introducing Mind Pump to your friends and family. We thank you for your support. Next time, this is Mind Pump.