How Fast Can You Notice a Difference When Doing Ab Workouts?

As with any exercise plan, abdominal workout results vary from person to person. It can take anywhere from two weeks to eight weeks to see noticeable results from your abdominal workout plan. You can speed up your results by using the most effective abdominal exercises and being consistent with your workouts. The more work you put into it, the better your results will be.

  1. Purpose

    • If you’re looking to burn away belly fat and strengthen your abs, a combination of cardio and ab exercises is the way to go. However, if you’re just looking to strengthen your abdominal and core muscles, ab exercises will get the job done. Keep this in mind when looking in the mirror each week to gauge your results. You may strengthen your abdominal muscles, but it may not show due to an excess of belly fat. This doesn’t mean your abs aren’t getting stronger, but it does mean you need to introduce some cardio exercise into your workout regimen.

    Workout Frequency

    • If your ab workout includes only bodyweight exercises, such as crunches or leg lifts, without added resistance, you can perform the workout up to five times a week without too much worry of overtraining. If you use ab machines at the gym, or you use any type of added resistance in your training, rest your abs for at least a day following a workout to ensure full recovery. If you exercise your abs to complete exhaustion or failure each workout, three workouts per week is adequate enough for most people to get fast results. Exercising until muscle failure means you can't complete the final rep of the set.

    Effective Ab Exercises

    • You’ll get quicker results by using ab exercises proven to work the abdominal muscles effectively. A Study conducted at Sand Diego State University and commissioned by the American Council on Exercise tested 13 of the most popular abdominal exercises to see which ones were the most effective. Four of the top most effective ab exercises were the bicycle maneuver, captain’s chair, exercise ball crunches and vertical leg crunches. For optimal results, use a variety of ab exercises in your workouts to challenge your abs in a different way with each one. Exercise at a high intensity and work your abs until exhaustion for speedy results.

    Sample Workout

    • An effective, high intensity ab workout would include choosing three different ab exercises -- for example, exercise ball crunches, reverse crunches and vertical leg crunches -- doing 12 to 15 repetitions of each in successive fashion with little rest in between each exercise. Once you've completed all three, rest for two minutes and repeat the three-exercise cycle again. If you really want to challenge yourself, do one or two more sets this way. Each workout takes no more than 10 minutes. Next time you use this workout, change up the three exercises you use -- bicycle maneuver, planks and basic crunches, for example -- to add some variety to your workouts and to challenge your abdominal muscles from different angles.