Can You Get Abs in a Week?

If your plan is to get visible abdominals in a week, it's time to set a fitness goal that's a little more realistic. Given that it's typically safe to only lose a couple pounds of fat per week, it's impossible to transform your body to the point of having abs in a week.

If you're serious about this goal, however, a strict diet and training regimen that includes cardio and strength training can lead you to your goal. Although if no concrete time frame exists, it might be possible to see some signs of abs in two months.

This ab challenge means overhauling your diet for the short term. Because no amount of abdominal exercise will eliminate the fat covering your abs, you'll have to burn as much of it as you can through traditional means such as diet. For the duration of the week, eliminate all carbohydrates in your diet, with the exception of breakfast, and replace them with protein.

This will serve to decrease your total caloric intake, causing your body to burn fat, and provide your abdominal muscles with the necessary protein to grow and recover. Don't worry about the fat in the protein sources; low-carbohydrate diets consistently outperform their low-fat counterparts.

Read more: What Percentage of My Diet Should Be Protein, Carbohydrate & Fat?

Perform cardiovascular exercise for at least 30 minutes every day of the week. If you're able, increase this duration to 60 minutes. Choose an activity that will reliably raise your heart rate for the entire duration of the workout, such as jogging or swimming. If possible, choose something you also enjoy; you'll be doing it all week.

This program not only burns excess calories and fat, but also increases your metabolism over the course of the week, allowing your body to burn even more fat while idle. While the amount of time you put in to get seven-day abs might seem overwhelming at first, it will set you up to continue these healthy habits long after the seven days are over.

Read more: List of Cardio Exercise

Schedule three sessions of direct abdominal work during the week. Leave at least one or two days between sessions to let your ab muscles rest. For each session, perform exercises that have been demonstrated to be significantly more effective than the standard crunch in eliciting activity within the abdominal muscles:

• Bicycle crunch
• Captain's chair
• Exercise ball crunch
• Vertical leg crunch

Use your breath effectively. As you bring your knee or leg close to your chest, exhale. Inhale as you move your limb away from your torso. For each of these exercises, perform two sets of as many repetitions as you can complete without sacrificing proper form. Rest for between 90 seconds and two minutes between sets.

Read more: The 41 Hardest Ab Exercises