I got my six pack abs back at 40 years old, and these ten habits are how I did it. The short version: stop doing crunches until you’re lean, get your calories down with fasting and zero liquid calories, track your weight and your sleep every day, and only start training abs daily once you can see them.
I’m Dan Rose, one of the original founders of Six Pack Shortcuts and SixPackAbs.com, and these are the ten things that actually work for me today.
1. Use AI to see what you’d look like with abs
Back in the nineties, us old people made vision boards. You’d cut a fitness model out of a magazine and maybe paste your own head on top. It worked, a little.
An AI image of you is a different level: your face, your frame, exactly the same, except the belly fat is gone and you have a six pack. When you see how good you’d look, you finally find the motivation to do the workouts and the diet you already know you need to do. Generate yours for free (the link is at the bottom of this page), make it the lock screen on your phone, and look at it every day.
2. Don’t do ab exercises until you can see your abs
I know most of you came here for ab exercises and don’t have abs yet. That’s exactly why this comes first.
There is no such thing as spot reduction. An hour of crunches a day doesn’t burn fat off your stomach. Your body loses fat evenly, everywhere. What ab exercises do is build the muscle underneath the fat. If you’re already lean, even a millimeter of new ab muscle makes a massive visual difference. If you still have belly fat, building that muscle makes your belly bulge out more.
Remember Chuck Liddell from the old UFC days? A pro athlete with a huge amount of core muscle, and he still looked like he had a little beer belly. Lots of ab muscle, not lean enough to show it. The next four tips are how you get lean enough to see your abs in the first place.
3. Do stomach vacuums instead of crunches
Crunches and toe touches train your rectus abdominis, the six pack muscle you see on someone who’s lean. A stomach vacuum is totally different. You suck your stomach in like you’re posing on a bodybuilding stage, and that trains your transverse abdominis: the sleeve of muscle on the inside that keeps you stable in a plank or a squat.
If you still have belly fat, that’s the only ab muscle you should be training, because it pulls your waist in and makes your stomach look smaller. That’s the visual difference you want right now.
Almost nobody with belly fat does vacuums. The most effective way is standing in front of a mirror, and a lot of beginners feel self-conscious posing at themselves. Bodybuilders use vacuums to fight the “bubble gut” that comes with steroid use, and they work just as well on a stomach that sticks out from belly fat. Here’s exactly how to do a stomach vacuum.
4. Cut all liquid calories, including protein shakes
Most liquid calories are pure sugar, and sugar absorbs even faster in liquid form: soda hits faster than candy, and fruit, with its fiber, far slower than either. Juice is just as bad as soda, with about as much sugar and as many calories. And milk is loaded with sugar even though it doesn’t taste sweet, which is why I don’t drink any.
Liquid calories are also the biggest mistake I see people make while fasting. Cream or artificial creamer in your morning coffee doesn’t fill you up, so it doesn’t feel like eating, but it breaks your fast and wrecks your results.
Protein shakes surprise people. Whey protein spikes your insulin hard. If your main goal is putting on muscle and you don’t mind some fat, whey can work well for you. If your goal is getting lean, skip it.
Here’s the study that drives this home. One group ate 450 calories of jelly beans every day. Another group drank 450 calories of soda. The jelly bean group did not gain weight, because they ate less of something else to make up for it. The soda group didn’t adjust at all. The soda went on top of everything they already ate, and they gained weight. Same sugar, same calories, different result.
5. Fast until 2 p.m. every day
Getting six pack abs mostly comes down to burning more calories than you eat. Workouts, supplements and weight loss medication can help, but the calories come first.
Eating breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks means shrinking every portion, and that’s hard. Skip breakfast, eat a late lunch, and it gets much easier. In the morning you’re working and thinking logically. At night you’re out having fun, and that’s when the temptations come out. Stay on point until 2 p.m. and you have a lot more room to enjoy yourself at night.
Intermittent fasting is the only thing that has worked for me to stay lean and keep my abs. Not eating for part of the day is so much easier than trying to eat a little less at every meal. I explain more in why I skip breakfast every single day.
6. Break your fast with a low-carb meal or a salad
When you break your fast, you’re usually still in work mode. Use that and make your first meal low-carb. It keeps you less hungry for the rest of the day.
Start the day with pancakes and you want more carbs at lunch, then even more at dinner, until you become the average American. Fast until two, break it with a salad or a low-carb meal, and you break that cycle. If you’re going to have carbs, have them late at night. Then you sleep, fast again, and start fresh the next day instead of losing the whole day.
7. Weigh yourself every day, even on vacation
When I was CEO of SixPackAbs.com, I used to say “what gets measured gets managed.” Brandon Carter, an OG YouTuber who’s still making videos, says it better: if you ain’t tracking, you’re slacking.
If you never look at your bank account, you end up broke. Weigh yourself once a year at the doctor’s office and you can be up 10 or 20 pounds before you notice. Weigh yourself every day and you catch it at two or three pounds, which you can lose in a couple of days. Ten or twenty pounds takes months of sacrifice.
A daily weigh-in is the bare minimum. I also use a smart scale and a sleep tracker, and I’m planning on a DEXA scan. Track as much as you can.
8. Consider a weight loss medication like Zepbound
These medications are incredibly powerful. The trial results for the newest ones, like retatrutide, are the kind of weight loss people used to only get from surgery, from an injection instead.
When I filmed this video, I’d been on Zepbound for about three weeks. I had some side effects, but my appetite dropped a lot, and it got much easier to stick to my diet and push an aggressive deficit.
They aren’t right for everybody, and there are side effects you need to know about. The average person on these drugs also loses a lot of muscle along with the fat, and we want to be muscular, not starved looking. So you still train, hit your protein every day, and eat right. The injection alone won’t make you ripped.
Don’t start one because I did. Research it in depth with an AI tool like Claude, ChatGPT or Gemini, then talk it through with your doctor to make sure it’s right for you.
9. Use a sleep tracker
I used to count sleep like this: in bed at midnight, up at 8 a.m., eight hours. That’s wrong. Most people in bed for eight hours only sleep about seven, and even eight real hours can be a terrible night without enough deep sleep and REM. Without a tracker, you have no idea.
There are three good options:
- Apple Watch. It tracks sleep, but I find it uncomfortable to wear to bed.
- Oura Ring. This is what I use. It’s the one I trust most for sleep, and it’s the most comfortable to sleep in. The newer generation is much thinner than the one I wear in the video.
- Whoop. A slim band that’s less bulky than a watch, so it’s comfortable to train and sleep in. Some people prefer it.
Pick one and use it. You need that data to get the quality sleep your body needs to get six pack abs.
10. Once you’re lean, train abs every day
I started doing this recently, and it’s made a real difference in how my abs look. It isn’t overtraining. Your abs don’t need the recovery your glutes or quads do, so you can hit them every day as long as you’re not doing a ton of sets. That’s what the fitness models with elite abs are doing.
I do three drop sets every day: one hard exercise, one medium, one easier, and I make sure to hit my rectus abdominis, obliques and transverse abdominis. The full routine is in why I train abs every single day. But remember tip 2: that’s for once you can see your abs. Until then, stick with vacuums.
The 10 tips at a glance
- Use AI to see what you’d look like with abs, and make it your lock screen.
- No ab exercises until you can see your abs.
- Do stomach vacuums instead of crunches while you still have belly fat.
- Cut all liquid calories, including juice, milk, creamer and protein shakes.
- Fast until 2 p.m.
- Break your fast with a low-carb meal or a salad.
- Weigh yourself every day.
- Consider a weight loss medication, with your doctor.
- Track your sleep.
- Once you’re lean, train abs every day.
Want to see what you’d look like with six pack abs? Generate your free AI transformation and make it your lock screen.
This is general fitness information, not medical advice. Some images in the video are AI-generated visualizations, and they’re labeled.
