As you get set up on your 8 pack ab workout program, one question you might be asking yourself is whether you can perform too many crunches. Most people think that the most important thing that they need to be doing to see 8 pack results is making sure that they have a good ab workout program in place.
While it will help, it’s definitely not going to be the end all to their success. Getting 8 pack abs takes much more than just an ab workout program, so you have to put it in its place.
That said, can you perform too many crunches?
Let’s look at the most important things that you should consider about this question.
The Time Question
The very first and most important thing to think about is how much time you’re spending doing all those crunches. Since most people do have a limited amount of time they are able to devote to the gym each week, the more time you spend doing crunches, the less time you have to spend on your other exercises.
Since the other exercises in your program – your squats, lunges, bench presses, and bent over rows are the ones that will burn up far more calories and assist with the weight loss process, this can serve to hinder your results.
Fat loss always needs to be the primary focus as you go about your ab program plan as it’s getting that layer of fat off your body that’s required for you to achieve 8 pack ab success.
If you are sacrificing the rest of your workout to get so many crunches in, you are definitely doing too many.
Overtraining
The second thing to take into account is the possibility of overtraining. Generally speaking, it is fairly hard to overtrain the abdominal muscles unless you’re doing set after set of weighted abdominal work.
Regular crunches however aren’t all that likely to overtrain the abs, so this won’t be as much of a concern.
But that said, what is a concern is the fact that if you aren’t allowing for rest time, you won’t be growing back all that much stronger.
Muscle Size Increases
Finally, the last thing that you may want to think about is the fact that performing a high amount of abdominal crunches may mean that you start to see noticeable increases in your muscle size.
If you are using weights as you go about your ab workouts, you could begin to increase the thickness of the waist and depending on the look you want to achieve, this may or may not be what you’re after.
Muscle size increases are generally only desired by males, so if you’re a female, not something that you want.
So this gives you a brief overview of whether you can perform too many crunches. You definitely can do too many to the point where you aren’t seeing any further progress because of doing so.
