There’s no shortage of fitness advice on the internet. Coaches, influencers, magazines, your gym buddy who did a juice cleanse once — everyone has a take. The problem isn’t that the advice is malicious. Most of it was repeated in good faith. The problem is that a lot of it doesn’t work, and following it is one of the main reasons people spend years training without ever seeing the abs they’re after.
Here’s a look at some of the most pervasive pieces of fitness wisdom that are either wrong outright or so overstated they’ve become useless — and what actually holds up when you look at the evidence.
Doing Abs Every Day Won’t Get You Abs Faster
This one shows up constantly. The logic sounds reasonable: your midsection needs work, so train it daily. But your abs are muscles, and muscles grow and recover like every other muscle group. Daily training doesn’t give them time to recover, and it doesn’t accelerate fat loss in the surrounding area — no matter how many crunches you do.
Two to four focused ab sessions per week is enough for most people. The real constraint is body fat percentage, not ab training frequency. You can have well-developed rectus abdominis muscles and still not see them if you’re carrying enough subcutaneous fat above them. The training gets you the muscle structure; the diet gets you the visibility.
The “1 Gram of Protein Per Pound” Rule Is Probably Too Much
This has been the default recommendation in fitness circles for decades, and it’s mostly fine — but it’s also higher than what the research actually supports for most situations. Current evidence suggests that roughly 0.7 to 0.8 grams per pound of bodyweight is sufficient for muscle retention and growth in most people who aren’t in extreme conditions.
Where the higher end matters is during a cut. When you’re in a calorie deficit — which you need to be to see abs — going higher on protein helps preserve lean mass. Somewhere between 0.8 and 1.2 grams per pound of lean body mass is a reasonable range depending on how aggressive the deficit is and how much muscle you’re trying to protect.
What this means practically: if you’ve been avoiding food to hit a round protein number, you may have been undershooting calories unnecessarily. Eat enough to support training; adjust protein based on what phase you’re in.
Eating Fat Does Not Make You Fat
Dietary fat was demonized for decades, and the low-fat movement did a lot of damage. Fat is calorie-dense (9 calories per gram versus 4 for protein and carbs), which means portion awareness matters more than it does with other macros. But eating fat doesn’t create body fat in any direct sense — a calorie surplus does, regardless of where the calories come from.
Fats are also essential. They support hormone production including testosterone, aid fat-soluble vitamin absorption, and contribute to satiety in ways that make dietary adherence easier. Cutting fat too low — say, below 15% of total calories — tends to backfire because it impairs hormonal function and makes meals feel unsatisfying.
If you’re eating mostly whole foods, including fat is not a problem. The calorie balance is what drives body composition outcomes.
More Cardio Is Not Always the Answer
When fat loss stalls, most people reach for more cardio. It makes intuitive sense — burn more calories, lose more fat. But the relationship between cardio volume and fat loss breaks down past a certain point, and for several reasons.
Excessive cardio increases cortisol, which promotes fat retention (particularly around the midsection) and can suppress muscle-building signals. It also tends to increase appetite, eroding the deficit you were trying to create. And the body is adaptive — energy expenditure during low-intensity activity tends to decrease as the body compensates.
Moderate cardio — three to five sessions per week at low to moderate intensity, 20 to 40 minutes — works well for most people in a fat loss phase. The smarter lever when progress stalls is often a modest reduction in food intake rather than adding more sessions.
The Scale Is a Terrible Short-Term Progress Metric
Body weight fluctuates by two to five pounds day to day depending on water intake, sodium consumption, carbohydrate levels, sleep, and digestive contents. Checking your weight daily and reacting to each data point leads to unnecessary anxiety and bad decisions.
What actually works: weigh yourself at the same time each day (morning, after using the bathroom, before eating), record the numbers, and track a seven-day rolling average. A consistent downward trend in that average over weeks means the approach is working. Day-to-day numbers are noise. Treating them as signal causes people to abandon working protocols prematurely.
Progress photos taken every two weeks tend to be more informative than daily scale checks, particularly when visual ab definition is the goal.
Where the Video Comes In
Jeff Nippard covers a longer list of overrated fitness advice in his breakdown below, and he goes deeper on several points that most content just glosses over — including why some advice that’s technically accurate has been so overstated that following it too rigidly actually works against you. It’s worth watching if you want a thorough evidence-based teardown of the ideas that might be quietly holding your results back.
The through-line in all of this: getting lean enough to see your abs is not complicated, but it’s precision-sensitive. Bad information at scale — even well-intentioned bad information — adds up to years of wasted effort. Knowing what to ignore is at least as valuable as knowing what to do.
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