2885: How to Get Six-Pack Abs in 4–6 Weeks: Track Calories, Eat High Protein, and Strength Train Your Core

0:00Host unforgettable backyard barbecues with savings from Whole Foods Market. Get the good times going with made-in-house chicken or pork sausages and ready-to-cook kebabs for hassle-free flavor. Grab tasty flatbreads and their new balsamic chicken salad in the prepared foods department. Keep things fresh with organic red cherries, strawberries, and peaches at their peak. And stock up on bug sprays and sun care must-haves. Make your summer sizzle at Whole Foods Market. Ever wonder why scam calls feel so specific? Why they somehow already know your name, your city, or even your address? It's usually because of data brokers.

0:38These companies collect your personal information from across the internet and sell it online, usually without you even realizing it. Things like your phone number, home address, family members, and even places you've lived. And once your information is out there, it spreads fast. That's where Aura comes in. Aura automatically finds your personal information on data broker sites and submits removal requests for you. Then Aura keeps monitoring to help make sure your information stays gone. You can even see where your data was found and removed. And Aura goes beyond data removal. You also get a VPN, antivirus, password manager, spam call protection, dark web monitoring, and up to$5 million in identity theft insurance.

1:24Right now, you can try Aura free at Aura.com slash hidden. That's Aura.com slash hidden. If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. Mind Pump. Mind Pump. With your hosts, Sal DiStefano, Adam Schaefer, and Justin Andrews.

1:44Adam Schafer:You just found the most downloaded fitness, health, and entertainment podcast in history. This is Mind Pump. All right, in today's episode, we're going to teach you three things you can do to get a six-pack, six-pack abs, in four to six weeks. By the way, we have a core training program, a program designed to give you a six-pack to build those abs, give you hard obliques, to make you look impressive in the midsection, and it's 50 % off. You can get the full program for$28.50. Go to NoBS6Pack.com. That's NoBS, the number six, Pack.com. Use the code 6PACK for 50 % off. That's the number six. And then pack again.

2:24Adam Schafer:That'll get you the price of$28.50. Now, this episode is brought to you by Crisp Power. These are high-protein pretzels. One bag of pretzels would normally contain one gram of protein. Not Crisp Power. Crisp Power protein pretzels are like 24 to 28 grams of protein in a bag. Same size bag of pretzels, way more protein. Why is this good? Build more muscle, burn more body fat, get more satiety. What does that mean? That means one bag of Crisp Power pretzels, although they taste like normal pretzels, because they're so high in protein, they satisfy your appetite. You eat way less as a result because protein produces satiety.

3:08Adam Schafer:You will not find a pretzel company that makes something as delicious with as much protein as Crisp Power. Go check them out. Go to crisppower.com forward slash Mind Pump. Use the code Mind Pump. Get 10 % off. All right, real quick. If you love us like we love you, why not show up by rocking one of our shirts, hats, mugs, or training gear over at MindPumpStore.com? I'm talking right now. Hit pause. Head on over to MindPumpStore.com. That's it. Enjoy the rest of the show. We're going to talk about six-pack abs. We're going to talk about the three things you can do to get a six-pack in four to six weeks.

3:47Sal Di Stefano:Oh, man, this would be easier

3:49Adam Schafer:helping people make a million dollars. The statistics show that. There are more. Statistically, there are more millionaires than people with six-pack ads.

3:58Sal Di Stefano:That's wild when you think about that. When you think about the difficulty of making a million dollars and think that you feel like very few people have that. It just shows you how few people have actual six-pack.

4:10Adam Schafer:Well, think about how many millionaires have a six-pack.

4:12Sal Di Stefano:I wonder what. Yeah, that's even more rare. How do you think, Damon? Because there's probably a lot of people that have had a six-pack, but then they don't keep it. And so how do they count that, right? Is it like at any given time, there's only a percentage? Also, you've got to be muscular. It can't just be like the skinny pack. Bingo. Skinny abs. Because we all have abs. That's where I've seen the most.

4:36Adam Schafer:No, that's a good point because when you train wrong, because let's say you're trying to get a six pack and you're working out, right? If you train wrong, you don't build. People forget that the abs are muscles. They, for some reason, we consider them as something different. And yes, it's true. You need to get lean to see your abs. But when you build them, they're just going to be more visible at higher body fat percentages.

5:01Sal Di Stefano:I experienced this myself. It'd be interesting to test the, like what that is on average, like the percentage. I know we've speculated on here. we've talked about this like you know the difference of like building your abs you know you could probably see them at 2 to 3 % higher body fat that's right you know is what I would I would speculate but it'd be cool to see an actual like study around that well think about

5:23Adam Schafer:an arm think about a guy who's 16 % body fat so that's not lean enough to be considered like really lean but it's athletic right think about a guy with a lot of muscle who has 16 % body fat what his arm looks like versus a guy with no muscle at 16 % body fat what does his arm look like i mean i would go even as high as 18 19 if you if you train

5:45Sal Di Stefano:your muscles for a long period of time and you have and you have them decent arms even at even at 18 19 body fat you look like you work out that's right so if you train wrong to get a six

5:58Adam Schafer:pack you're just not going to build them um so that it's going to be much more difficult to make them visible. And then if you eat wrong, here's what happens if you eat wrong, you lose muscle or you gain fat. You may lose weight on the scale, but you're not leaner. Remember leaner, what we're after for is leaner and leaner is body composition. Leaner is not necessarily lighter or skinnier. So a guy, and you could pull this up. You could probably find this online. If you picked up, if you pulled up a six foot tall guy at 10 % body fat, who's 200 pounds versus a 19 % body fat, six foot tall guy at 200 pounds, they look radically different.

6:40Adam Schafer:They look very, very different. And in fact, most people would think that the 10 % body fat guy is much lighter, but he's just leaner. He's a lot leaner. So if you don't train right and you don't eat right, or you do things the wrong way, what you end up with is no results or maybe even worse results. What I have seen so many times in the past is that people will do this the wrong way and they'll lose weight and actually end up flabbier than they were before because of the amount of muscle that they lost. They're actually weaker and flabbier at a lighter body weight on the scale. And so if you're after a six pack, what you want to do is get leaner and build.

7:16Yeah, you don't want to lose muscle in the process. That's right.

7:19Adam Schafer:So here's step one. Step one is we want to start tracking. We want to start tracking because we're going to be trying to be in a what's known as a calorie deficit. So anytime you want to lose body fat, you have to eat less calories than you're burning. Okay. And in order to do that, you have to know how many calories you're burning on a regular basis. Now, there's a couple ways to do this. You could get a general number. You could go to mapsmacro.com. We have a macro calculator. And this will give you kind of general idea of where you may be at, but it's not perfectly accurate. In fact, there is no perfectly accurate way to know how many calories you're consuming or should I say burning versus tracking.

8:04Adam Schafer:Tracking is the most accurate way to do this. So what you would do is over the next, let's say, seven days is you would not change your diet whatsoever. And you would use a tracking app to track everything that you eat and drink. and you're not changing anything. The goal is just to see what you average on a regular basis. By the way, just one tip on this. You want to track in real time. In fact, I saw some data on this earlier and it was like a duh moment for me. What people sometimes do when they track is they wait till the end of the day. Oh, terrible. Yep. To track.

8:39Sal Di Stefano:I've seen the stats on this. The percentage that you're likely to be off when you do that, it dramatically increases.

8:45Adam Schafer:Yes, instead of doing it in real time. Yes. So like right when you finish eating, track to me. What's crazy, Adam, is now there are apps that you could screenshot it. Yeah. And they're remarkably accurate. Whereas, you know, well, geez, when I was a trainer back in the day, we used to have a book. Was it Calorie King? Yeah. Is that the name of it? You'd have to like look it up and then weigh your food and do the whole thing. And then apps got better and you had to kind of know the weight or enter the food. But now you can literally take a picture of it and it'll track it for you right then and there.

9:13Adam Schafer:Don't leave anything out. track everything you eat, everything you drink for seven days so you can get an average of what you're consuming. And this is what we're going to assume is your baseline. So if you're averaging every single day, 2 ,700 calories, then this is what your body is burning on a regular basis. You're consuming 27. This is what you're probably burning. So now we know what your baseline is. And so we want to go below that in order to lose some body fat.

9:40Sal Di Stefano:Yeah. I would add to that because what happens sometimes, somebody hears this episode and it prompts them to want to kick it up a notch or get back to being consistent and then this first week a mistake I see sometimes is they track, but they track the first week of their dieting already. They try to clean it up. They've already modified it. Exactly. They've already made behavior. It's like I always used to have to tell clients like, listen, this sounds weird but I want you to eat completely normal. Meaning, if you normally go get that frappuccino in the morning you know at starbucks i want you to do it and just we're just going to track it now if you normally have a late night snack i want you to do it i want you to do the things that you normally do so i have a true baseline um because if you just send people off to track for a week and they're now motivated to track and do a diet and go to actually like they tend to change behaviors because they know they're tracking because there's there's a bunch of research on that too like people that just track automatically start to eat less eat less because they know they're tracking.

10:40Sal Di Stefano:And so I would always have to put this emphasis on, listen, we're trying to really find your baseline right now. And so I really want just normal week of eating. This is not me going, oh, that's bad or good or measuring any of that. It's like we want to see your normal patterns and behaviors.

10:57Adam Schafer:Now, why is that so important? Because if you go in too large of a deficit, the risk of losing muscle goes up.

11:04Sal Di Stefano:That's right. So if you have somebody who already starts to correct behaviors and is eating cleaner, i.e. shaving now 250, 500 calories a day because they know they're tracking. And then your coach or then you take the advice you're about to give where you reduce calories. Well, now you put them in this massive deficit they didn't need to be in because they already were in a deficit because they're tracking.

11:23Adam Schafer:Yeah. So in other words, I may want to put someone in a calorie deficit of 500 to 700 calories, but because the person already cleaned up quote unquote their diet when they were tracking, now I accidentally put them at a 1200 calorie deficit, which increases the odds that they're going to lose muscle. And we don't want to lose muscle. Losing muscle is the wrong strategy, especially if you want to see muscles. You want to see muscle? You want to see your abs? They got to be there. You got to have them built. And losing muscle is not going to accomplish. You might get lighter on the scale, but you're not going to get necessarily leaner.

11:52Adam Schafer:So you want to track for about seven days. And we also want to start tracking some measurements. So waist measurement is a great way to do this. You can measure your waist with a circumference tape and do this at the same time every single day and get a nice general number. If this starts to go down, you're probably getting leaner. You tend to not build tons of muscle around the waist. So it's not like measuring your arm or it could get bigger as you get leaner type of deal. Your waist probably won't do much of that. So waist is a real basic, easy way to do this. Or you can use a body fat test, which is great as well.

12:26Adam Schafer:But again, if you're testing your body fat percentage, you want to look at trends. Don't look at the number that you just got based off the last one over the next few weeks or whatever. We're looking at trends, which direction is it going? Then we get to the diet part. So now you're like, okay, uh, I know what my calories are normally. I'm going to cut my calories down. Typically you want to go about 500 below what you were averaging. You may be tempted to go even more than that. Don't do that. It'll increase your odds of rebound or increase your odds of losing muscle. And we can always go lower later.

12:59Adam Schafer:You could later, right? Leave some room. So give us just 500. That's it. 500 below what you were eating. And now here's what we're going to do. I want you to eat your body weight in grams of protein. Eat your target body weight in grams of protein. This accelerates fat loss. So when they compare diet, diet to diet, where the calories are the same, both in a calorie deficit, the high protein version loses more body fat and maintains more muscle. So in other words, you'll lose the same amount of weight, except some of more of it's going to come from muscle. If the protein isn't where we're saying it, by the way, and if you look up high protein RDA, it's not what we're saying.

13:38Adam Schafer:We're saying optimal protein from what we see on the studies, the upper limit from where you're going to get benefit, which is close to about a gram of protein per pound of target body weight. You also want to avoid heavily processed foods. Heavily processed foods make you overeat. In the data, when you look at the studies and you compare, and they compare these diets together, really well-controlled studies, people consume 500 to 600 more calories when they eat processed foods with the same level of satiety, meaning same level of fullness, but I just ate 600 more calories. And that's because processed foods are engineered to make you really want to overeat.

14:14Adam Schafer:And then the third thing is avoid foods that give you bloat. We are talking about wanting to see your abs and bloat isn't necessarily body fat, but if you want to see your abs, bloat will take away from that. And the foods that tend to contribute to bloat, this isn't true for everybody, but generally speaking, these are the foods that tend to be the greatest offenders. They tend to be gluten or dairy or eggs or lagoons or all three of those. And so I would try to look at easily digestible foods or foods that don't cause bloat. Now, if those foods don't cause bloat in you, that's totally fine. I would say of all of them, gluten seems to be the most consistent with the people that I've worked with that causes the most bloat.

14:52Adam Schafer:So I'd say stay away from it.

14:53Sal Di Stefano:You know, I think it's a good time. You're on a kick. You're going to start this plan. Maybe you think those foods don't cause that. I think it's a good time to test that.

15:05Adam Schafer:Yeah, remove them.

15:05Sal Di Stefano:I would always encourage clients that we were like, let's say we're going to set a goal like this. Let's get to our CR abs. And maybe I'd ask them previously, like, you know, are you allergic to any foods or intolerant to anything? No, no, I'm good. Gluten's fine. Dairy's fine. They tell me that. And then we go on this kick where we're really dialing in and we're trying to really move the needle or see visible change in your abs. A lot of times I would encourage them. Hey, I know you told me that, you know, you don't have any issues with gluten or this and that. But since we're doing this anyways and we're eating, let's try and actually limit this or cut this out for a little bit.

15:39Sal Di Stefano:Just tell me how you feel. I'm just curious. A lot of times I would encourage them to do that because what I've found is there's a spectrum here. There is definitely people that are very aware they have a dairy intolerance. There's no denying that. You know that. It's like immediately. Yeah, you have something and it affects you immediately. Then you have somebody who I think is like, so like I'm a lower on that spectrum. Like I can get away with a serving or so of dairy. I started hitting two servings of dairy or three servings of dairy in a day. And I start to have, I see, I see stool issues.

16:09Sal Di Stefano:I see bloat. I start to notice that. So I think a lot of people fall somewhere on that spectrum and they assume because they don't have this loud signal that says you're intolerant to it, that they don't have a mild intolerance to it. And so what a great time you're trying to see your abs. Like, how about we pull this out for a little bit? And I have found that a lot of clients who are okay with eating those foods realize, you know what? I was okay, but I'm even better when I don't. And I see my abs. I'm leaner. I feel better. And so this is a good time. I would encourage even the people that think they have no intolerances to this to test out pulling some of those out and see if you see an improvement.

16:52Sal Di Stefano:If you see no improvement after the 60, 90 days that you're doing this, then cool. Have it in there. But I would say 80 % of the clients that thought they had no intolerance whatsoever to any of those foods, when I convinced them to at least try that, saw an improvement. Yeah, it's interesting, too, because there's also that delayed effect like a day or two later. That's right. Now you're not pinning it specifically to that food group unless you're really tracking that. So I think it is like, you know, it's something to peer into.