Confession: I have an “Ab Day”

Sometimes having a dedicated time or day to focus on a weak point trumps “optimal”.

If you are someone who knows anything about fitness or bodybuilding, I probably lost all credibility with you as soon as you read the title of this post. That’s fine. I get it. I really do. Having an entire day dedicated to training your abdominal muscles is probably the silliest thing I can think of doing and I don’t think there’s a single pro bodybuilder who has such a thing. Abs are trained as part of most compound movements and isolation exercises for the abdominals are pretty much always added to the end of other days.

It’s also probably the best decision I’ve made regarding my training outside of the basics. If you’ve been involved in the general online fitness community, there are two things you’ve probably heard. The first is that “Abs are made in the kitchen.” This isn’t really true. What it really should be is that “Abs are made in through exercise and revealed in the kitchen.” In other words, seeing your abs is about losing fat, but you still need to train them if you want them to pop.

The second you’ve probably heard is the phrase that someone will “train abs at home.” Almost every program I’ve ever seen has you training your abs, if you do it at all, last. The joke, that hides the truth, is that a lot of people will simply neglect abdominal training because they feel like they already got worked enough with their main exercises and if they need to, they can do them separately later. When you’re exhausted and lying in a pool of sweat, ab training that you can do with minimal equipment seems like it can wait till you’re home and somewhat rested. Of course, later usually never comes.

We can talk all day about discipline and “just doing it,” but it took me a while to finally accept that any ab training I did at the end of a full workout was simply going to be half-assed. If I was running late or something came up, I’d skip it entirely. I finally decided that this simply wasn’t working, so I took one of my rest days and made it a short, but focused, abdominal day. It’s honestly been great.

So what is the point of this post? First, I want you to understand that sometimes you have to figure out ways to almost trick yourself into doing what you need to do. First, try to do it the “right” way, but if after 15 years (and hopefully way sooner) you are still simply not doing it the right way, figure out a workaround. Second, there’s no real rules to any of this that you can’t bend, break, or outright defy.