Getting in shape is one of the best things that you can do for your body. Not only will you impress everyone around you, but you’ll get so much stronger, develop better habits, and live a healthy lifestyle. And what’s a better way to prove this level of fitness than having a shredded six-pack that you can show off every time you’re shirtless. However, getting in shape is one thing, but maintaining it is a whole different story. With that being said, can you lose your abs in a week?
No, you can’t lose abs in a single week, it takes about three to five weeks of inactivity before muscle mass in the abdomen section starts to decrease, however, that time can be significantly shortened or lengthened depending on what you eat and what your daily habits are.
In this article, we’ll talk more in-depth if you can lose your abs in a week, how quickly you can lose them, and the main reasons why they go away.
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Can You Lose Your Abs in a Week?
Before answering this question, I’ll talk about my own personal experience in this particular matter. As a little backstory, ever since I was a kid, I’ve always struggled with being skinny which is the main reason why I decided to kickstart my own fitness transformation journey and it was the best decision of my life since I managed to transform my body in 3 years. I gained almost 40 pounds of muscle mass that included bigger pecs, larger arms, and of course, shredded abs.
I know what you’re thinking, what does this have to do with losing abs? Well, when I say “transform my body in 3 years”, I don’t necessarily mean that I used to train every single day during that period without taking a break.
Since training takes a toll on your body and overdoing it may have the opposite effect that you’re hoping for, I used to take a break every now and then. And most of these breaks lasted more than a week, did I lose my abs during that time? No, not at all. In fact, my abs would either stay the same or look even better. And that’s exactly why I took a lot of breaks without worry. I knew that it would take a lot more time than just a week before my body starts to lose muscle mass.
Breakdown
In order to further explain why you can’t lose your abs in a single week, let’s break down a research that was done by the University of Copenhagen The Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences. They conducted a little experiment by examining what happens to muscles in younger and older men after a period of high inactivity (in their case it was the legs).
What they found is, that after two weeks of completely immobilizing the legs, men of all age groups lost about a third to one-fourth of their muscular strength (the more muscle mass you have, the more you’ll lose).
And this can not only be applied to the legs, but also to all other muscle groups including the abs since they’re made out of the same components.
So this means that you’ll start losing muscle mass after 2 weeks of inactivity, right? well, that’s not necessarily the case. In this experiment, they completely immobilized the legs so there was no activity in them whatsoever, however, in your case, even if you don’t engage your abs in those two weeks (meaning that you don’t train them), they’ll still be partially active since basic activities like walking, standing, jumping all engage the core.
So how quickly can you lose abs?
From what we understood in the little experiment, complete immobilization of the muscle will cause it to decrease in about 2 weeks. However, since it’s hard to immobilize the abs due to the fact that the core is always engaged while doing basic activities, it’ll take about three to five weeks of inactivity before noticing any loss in terms of abs. However, this time can be significantly increased or decreased to different factors that we’ll talk about in the next section.
Why Do Abs Go Away?
There are many reasons why you can lose your abs:
Lack of activity
We’ll start off with the most obvious one which is too much inactivity. As we all know, regular activity is what keeps our muscles intact. Again, we’ll take a look at the same experiment that I mentioned before, just a mere two weeks of muscle inactivity caused a muscle loss of about 25 to 33% which is a lot. Yes, it’s an exaggerated effect since the muscles were completely immobilized but it just shows the heavy effect that activity has on our muscles.
And this is exactly why most people decide to join the gym or start some form of physical training just to avoid muscle loss.
Too Much Belly Fat
Great, you’ve managed to get in shape and build up some impressive abs, but you wake one day and suddenly, you start noticing that they’re slowly fading away. This is probably because you gained too much body fat that slowly added an extra layer on top of your abs which made them invisible. Maybe you started eating too much junk food or skipped most of your workouts. Nonetheless, too much belly fat will definitely make your abs go away.
Aging
Aging also plays a huge factor in terms of natural muscle loss. According to the Current Opinion in Clinical Nutrition & Metabolic Care, muscle mass (includes also abdominal muscles) decreases by about 3 to 8% per decade after the age of 30 and this rate significantly increases after the age of 60.
This is the exact reason why older people are weaker, and more likely to get disabled since they don’t have enough muscles to support injuries in the case of a fall for example.
Stress
Stress can also be the cause why you’re losing your abs. According to a research done by The American Journal of Physiology-Regulatory, Integrative and Comparative Physiology, daily psychological stress is heavily associated with muscle loss.
Stress will not only cause you to lose muscle mass, but it’ll also contribute to gaining unusual amounts of weight which are two essential factors that will make your abs go away.
Conclusion:
Although losing abs take much longer than a single week, it can still happen pretty quickly if you’re lacking in daily activity, gain too much body fat that adds an extra layer to the mid section, get stressed out too often, and age which is inevitable.