How to Get a Six Pack Without Doing Any Cardio!!!

Posted On September 10, 2020

Don’t believe it’s possible to get a six-pack without doing any cardio? In this article, I will teach you how you can get a six-pack without ever stepping on a treadmill or doing any other type of cardio exercise.

Step 1: Get Your Nutrition on Point

No matter how hard you train, if your nutrition isn’t on point, you will have no shot at getting that six-pack.

The key to eating to get a six pack is to create just enough of a calorie deficit to burn body fat but not too much that your body starts tapping into hard earned muscle.

The quality of your foods also plays a huge role. You should eat only whole foods in their most natural state. Think chicken, turkey, fish, vegetables, and fruits.

Check out How to Eat to Get a Six Pack to get your nutrition on point.

Step 2: Strength Train

The real secret to getting ripped and finally revealing your six-pack is strength training.

Unlike most cardio exercise, strength training has what’s called the Triple Fat Burning Effect.

1. Strength training burns calories while you are doing it.
2. If you train at a high enough intensity, you burn calories at an accelerated rate for up to 48 hours after your workout.
3. When you gain muscle from strength training, you will speed up your metabolism and be burning more calories all of the time (even while you sleep!)

Don’t belong to a gym? No worries! Strength training can be done with just your own bodyweight, resistance bands, suspension training, stability balls, and other relatively inexpensive equipment you can buy and use at home.

Step 3: Do Full Body Workouts

To reveal your six-pack you need to lower your body fat. The most effective way to do this is through full body strength training workouts.

The more muscles you use in a workout, the more calories you burn. The more calories you burn, the more fat you lose. It’s as simple as that.

Step 4: Use the Most “Bang-for-Buck” Exercises

Exercise selection is crucial if you want to shed enough fat to finally reveal that six-pack.

Many people think hundreds of crunches are the key to sculpted abs, but it’s not true. Although you do need to work out your ab muscles, your six-pack will never show if it’s covered up by a layer of fat.

This is why exercise selection is so important when using strength training for fat loss. The goal should be to create the most energy demand by recruiting as many muscle groups as possible.

So rather than choosing isolation type exercises that only focus on one muscle at a time (like biceps curls), choose compound exercises like squats, deadlifts, lunges, bench presses, dips, pull-ups, and other multi-joint, multiple muscle group exercises. These exercises work the largest muscle groups and burn the most calories which leads to greater fat loss.

Step 5: Train 6 times a week

Rather than spending countless hours on a treadmill, strength training almost every day (with the exception of one day for rest) will keep your body in a constant fat burning state.

Because you are working out more frequently, you should workout at a higher intensity for a shorter period of time. Keep workouts to around 45 minutes to an hour to avoid overtraining.

Step 6: Use a Push / Pull Training Split

When training 6 days a week, you should split your training up to allow your muscles to recover between sessions. The simplest way to do this is to work out different muscle groups on different days.

Probably the easiest way to do this is to alternate between upper body and lower body workouts.

If you’d like to do full body workouts, you can split each workout into a push or pull day. For example, you could schedule push exercises on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and pull exercises on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays.

Check out How to Use Split Training to Lose Fat and Build Muscle to learn more.

Step 7: Use Supersets or Circuits

Using supersets and circuits is one of the most efficient and effective ways to strength train if your goal is fat loss. The question is: Which one should you use?

The answer really depends on the space and equipment you have available.

Since it’s considered bad gym etiquette to use 4 pieces of equipment at once or to take up a bunch of space, supersets are usually the better option for the gym. You just need to make sure you are keeping the intensity extremely high for each set since you will only be doing 2 at a time compared to 3 or 4 in a circuit.

If you are working out at home, then using a circuit is probably the better option.

Check out How to Use Superset Workouts & Circuit Training to Build Muscle & Burn Fat to learn more.

Step 8: Rest only 30 seconds between sets

Since your goal is to keep your heart rate up as much as possible throughout the workout, you want to keep rest to a minimum. A 30 second rest between sets gives you just enough time to let your muscles recover while burning calories at an extremely high rate.

If you find yourself too tired to do the next set, try extending your rest period up to a minute and then shortening it down as your conditioning gets better.

How Soon Can I Expect Results?

It depends on how much fat you have to lose. On average most people lose 8-12 lbs of fat in their first month. Anything more than that means you are losing muscle so you will need to slow things up to make sure you are only burning fat.

If you are already pretty conditioned and don’t have much fat to lose, you will want to track your waist measurement or body fat percentage rather than the scale.

After the first 4-6 weeks, your body will start to adapt to your workouts so you will want to change things up a bit. This can be doing anything from changing the number of sets, reps, rest periods, to changing the exercises altogether.

Keep in mind, the less fat you have lose, the slower the actual weight loss will be. You may actually gain muscle and lose fat so even though your weight might not be changing, the way you look definitely will.