The body structure of a human is complicated to understand; with that, it is necessary to know how hard your workout should be. But more often a question arises about how often you should work your abs a week.
Abs are the most focused body part a person wants to flourish after working out. But this also has a limit to getting muscled, as more abs workouts and compound exercises can hamper the muscle groups and make you feel choked later.
So, within this, one needs to understand his body structure and accordingly, he should manage his workout routines. If you have a strong core, it is better to work out for longer, focusing on your abs. But a person like you who is new to all this may wonder how often should you workout your abs a week?
1. What Are Ab Workouts?
Out of all the other workouts, ab workouts are considered necessary for the defined midsection and six-pack development. They also help in strengthening the core muscles and providing you with a strong core and a great upper body.
Although this may seem very easy to work workout, a gym enthusiast who knows the pain can understand what importance it carries.
Almost everyone wants to have this kind of six-pack abs, but going through this resistance exercise can churn your entire core and can be very enigmatic.
2. Importance of Abs Workouts
As they say, the abs are the most strengthening part of the human body, and their strength can strengthen the whole body simultaneously.
Similarly, doing regular ab workouts can play a vital role in shaping a good posture of yours, along with making your spine stabilized.
With that, when you work on your abdominal muscles properly, the facilitating movements of your trunk can also get better making way for you to have a strong core. A strong core can also promote a healthy posture for you and reduce the chances of back pain.
So, when you incorporate the ab exercises into your daily workout routine, it will help strengthen your core muscles. This will help in improving overall fitness and reducing the risk of injury when you do any sort of workout.
3. How Ab Workout Frequency and Muscle Growth Works?
When someone works out, they want some easy and fast results, through which they can see the significant change in their body. This is where the abs workouts work the best by allowing your abs to flourish and give faster results.
At this time, your body also needs to recover the lost muscle groups, and for this reason, muscle growth only happens when you give it enough time to recover.
This is the reason why it is necessary to step down from the ab exercises after a certain period so that you do not face excess baggage.
When you start working out more than enough, your body sometimes fails to handle the overtraining, leading to different injuries. So, the risk of injury is directly proportional to the extreme overtraining circumstances.
If this is not kept in mind and the overtraining continues, there can also be severe medical complications. Hence, it is better to understand your muscle growth and gradually lead to a synced ab training that your body can resist.
4. Factors Impacting Ab Training Frequency
The ab training frequency depends on different factors among which fitness level, recovery time and capacity, and your personal training routine depend on a lot. You need to consider each of these to get a better knowledge of what your routine for abs should be.
4.1 Fitness Level
This thing about our body needs to be understood that, at first it is very easy to get a certain body structure, but to keep it intact, that’s what it takes time.
So, when you begin your workout process, it might be too easy for you to achieve some great results within a short period. But when you keep doing it again and again, the significant change stops showing.
This is when you need to add some higher volume into your ab exercises, which can gradually provide you with that significant change.
This visible significant change not only gives you a good body structure but also makes you more enthusiastic to perform more to achieve more.
4.2 Recovery Rate
The recovery period is the time when the torn muscles get into their paces and the muscle growth happens.
For each individual, this recovery rate fluctuates and also depends on factors like age, sleep schedule, sleep quality, and the protein and nutrition intake they are having.
During this process of recovery, it is important to understand your bodily needs and the pressure your body can only handle. Because if you are going more than that and not giving enough time to your body to recover, things can go out of hand.
During this process, it is very basic and normal to have issues like muscle soreness and during this the recovery periods can be very long, making it hard to get through.
Once you get along with this process you can increase the frequency and gradually the body will also be able to get along this process.
4.3 Other Workout Routines
If you are involved in different another health process along with ab workout, then you should keep a check on the workout routine.
For other health activities that focus on the core muscles like yoga or other available sports, then ab workouts should be avoided or should be done with a limit in mind.
Otherwise, overtraining can change the muscle groups resulting in fractured muscle cell structure.
5. Are Nutrition and Body Fat Percentage Important?
Well-developed abs are visible for those who have a strong core, and a strong core can only be visible with a healthy amount of body fat percentage. When you have a good body fat percentage, then your abs are quite prominently visible and also something that you can feel about.
With a good body fat percentage, you can also work better on your abs as they help you enhance your body muscles. But when you have excessive body fat, then the abdominal muscles get sidelined and sometimes also are hidden under belly fat.
Along with that nutrition can also be an important factor in injecting the healthy factor inside your body, which can help you grow stronger. The nutrition becomes necessary for you to have enough level of energy so that the core training can be possible.
5.1 How Does It Affect the Strong Core?
Sometimes this body fat percentage gets very high and to burn fat of the entire body, all the focus should be on the diet. If you have a healthy diet, which has enough amount of protein, some healthy fats, and the necessary calories, then the fat loss gets better.
When you start having this as a regular diet, along with cardiovascular exercises and resistance training, then you can achieve maximum results and the ab training should be constant.
6. Understanding the Anatomy of The Abs
When we think about what generally abs are, they are nothing but just the midsection comprising several significant core muscles. These core muscles have several separate functions, and they collectively form the abdominals of your body structure.
To have a whole developed abdominal structure, it is understood to know the types of abs we have and how to train abs directly.
6.1 The Visible Abs
6.1.1 Rectus Abdominis
When someone dreams or thinks of having abs, this is the region which he or she tries to focus on. This part is the prominent part of the visible muscles which make the six-pack region filled with abs.
When it comes to ab exercises, this part gets the most focus and this is the part where the ab muscles are present, and the core exercises have a better effect here.
6.1.2 External Obliques
This part of the muscle group helps in forming the midsection and serves as the brace and frame through which you can run the core muscles. These are the main rotational muscles that hold a prominent muscle in your stomach region.
6.2 The Invisible Abs and Other Muscles
6.2.1 Transverse Abdominal Muscles
This muscle group lies between the two important muscles, which are the rectus abdominis and external obliques.
This is generally a solid layer of the muscular group, and although it is not prominently visible, it holds an important role in having a strong core muscle.
6.2.2 Internal Obliques
The internal obliques are not so important to be discussed but this is important during the torso rotations. This is present in between the muscle fibers, which sit between external obliques and a small upper part of the transverse abdominis.
7. Basic Ab Workouts
Although there is a lot of gym equipment that focuses on training abs, there are also a lot of basic ab exercises that can be fruitful.
7.1 Bridge
If you are a beginner who is yet to start with those compound exercises, then bridge is the basic ab workout which can be very helpful to start with. The bridge is considered to be the foundational exercise of ab training.
To do it, you need to lie down on your back and keep your feet on the floor. While doing this you need to keep your face down and start inhaling and exhaling.
You need to repeat this process for 3 sets, with 10 reps in each set. If you start practicing it for a little longer, you can get great results in your muscle groups.
7.2 Crunch
When you start with the basic ab training, then crunches are the most effective exercises. While doing it regularly, they generally target the rectus abdominal muscles, which are very commonly known as the six-pack abs by the layman.
To perform it, you need to lie down properly and bend your knees, cross your arms on your chest, and roll your head to the ground. You can easily complete 3 sets of this with 15 times in each set, to get effective results.
7.3 Plank Poses
We do not get our abs to flourish if our belly portion is not that tight and that tight muscle groups can be achieved through regular plank positions. They are too effective in shedding out the fat from the belly region and mostly it does not come with compound exercises.
To do this, one needs to lie down on the stomach while raising all his body weight on his forearms and hands and hold this position for as long as possible.
Some people also do change this plank pose later on, by doing sidearm planks, with one forearm and the sides of their feet. It is not an ab workout, moreover, it is a yoga exercise, which helps the best to train your abs.
7.4 Captain’s Chair
A lot of people are not able to perform regular crunches due to several reasons, one of which is back problems. Due to this, there is another ab workout, which is known as captain’s chair, which is a process where you have an elevated pull-up chair.
Generally, it is known as hanging leg raises, where you have to raise your legs to the front in a pull-up chair pose. It is important to have a proper pose while doing this exercise, otherwise, you can get problems both in your forearms and neck.
8. Conclusion
Although everyone tries to have some good abs and lose their body fat, it is also important to take care of your health equally. If you start pushing your body more than it can do, it will surely backfire.
So, if you are focusing on ab muscles, and doing ab exercises, then it is equally important to keep a knowledge that how long your core can resist while training abs. An ideal ab training frequency is up to 3-4 times a week so that the muscle tissue doesn’t get tired.
However, if your body supports then you can also work out more on your abs for more than 4 times a week.
So, in a nutshell, resistance exercises are not that easy to perform, and personal goals should not affect the body structure. While training it is also important to keep an eye to prevent injury.
Last Updated on January 22, 2024 by Deveedutta Samal
