Not every challenge will offer great results. Find out whether doing 1000 crunches a day is worth your time, attention, and effort.
If your current strength level requires you to divide the 1000 crunches into 3 or more workouts with multiple sets, a routine like this could actually help you grow your ab muscles.
That being said, generally, most of your results will come from the first workout. The other ones will just require more time without too many extra positive effects.
Additionally, you can likely make your crunch sessions more time-efficient by doing fewer repetitions but with extra resistance.
Besides these things, doing 1000 crunches a day will burn a few extra calories and likely improve your ab muscle endurance.
An exercise routine like this could offer positive results but for most people and fitness goals, there are plenty of workout plans that are more effective.
What happens if you do 1000 crunches a day
Whether or not it is effective for certain goals will be discussed.
One thing is sure and that is that when doing 1000 crunches a day at least a few things will happen. This includes positive, neutral, and negative effects.
1000 crunches a day will burn a few calories
The crunch exercise is mostly an ab muscle resistance training exercise but because you will likely move more intensely than usual, you will also burn a few extra calories by doing it 1000 times.
There are ways to make predictions about how many calories you will burn. However, keep in mind that these are rough estimations. In reality, the number can look different for you due to a variety of reasons.
That being said, let’s say the average person does around 30 crunches per minute. In that case, some estimations about how many calories 1000 crunches a day burn for different body weights include:
- 125 pounds (56 kg) body weight: 92 calories
- 155 pounds (70 kg) body weight: 114 calories
- 185 pounds (83 kg) body weight: 136 calories
- 215 pounds (97 kg) body weight: 158 calories
At first, this may sound alright but these amounts are relatively low for 33.3 minutes of exercise. Not just compared to cardiovascular workouts like running but also compared to other resistance training exercises like squats.
Will you lose belly fat?
Even if 1000 crunches burn a few extra calories, that does not necessarily mean they will get you to your fitness goals.
To lose weight you need to make it so your body requires more energy to function than is coming in from food. When this is the case, you start using other energy stores like body fat to get the remaining needs.
After that, whether the body fat will come from your belly or other areas mostly depends on things like how far you are in your fitness journey.
So in theory, 1000 crunches a day could help you lose a bit of belly fat in combination with good habits in other lifestyle areas.
In practice, you will have to pay a lot of attention to these other areas and/or implement other workouts. Even then, the fat you lose may mostly come from places other than your stomach.
You may grow your ab muscles
To grow your ab muscles you have to put them under enough pressure, do enough repetitions, eat the right nutrients, and rest enough.
If you are able to do 1000 crunches in one workout and a few sets, it is generally a sign you need to make the movement more challenging to really see ab muscle growth.
It could also be the case that you have to split the 1000 crunches up into 3 workouts of 6 sets of 55 repetitions because your ab muscles fatigue too soon otherwise.
In that case, doing 1000 crunches a day could help you grow your abs if you really push yourself to failure in these rep ranges.
However, the two sessions after the first batch of 330 repetitions or potentially even fewer crunches will have small and potentially no extra positive effects for ab muscle growth.
Your ab muscle endurance will likely improve
When growing and strengthening your abs you will likely see small improvements in muscle endurance too. Even so, the way you train muscles influences what fitness components you really improve.
If you get to a point where you can complete the 1000 crunches a day in two or even one workout (and likely before that), you are typically mostly improving muscle endurance in your abs.
This can be beneficial for your health and daily activities too.
However, many people will not really be interested in the muscle endurance. At least not at the cost of seeing less ab muscle growth.
You may get sore muscles
Resistance training exercises can lead to muscle soreness the day after and potentially even on the same day. Especially if you do them in the high-repetition sets that are needed to reach 1000 crunches a day.
Having sore muscles is not the end of the world but you may find it uncomfortable and inconvenient during the rest of your daily activities.
You will have less time for other exercises
At a pace of 30 repetitions a minute, it will take around 33.3 minutes to do 1000 crunches without breaks.
In reality, most people will have to take at least a few breaks. This will increase your workout time.
A 30-minute workout a day may sound normal to a good amount of people but spending all this time on crunches alone is a bit much for most fitness goals.
On top of that, many people have at least some limitations in terms of how long they have to work out.
So even if you are able and willing to free up 30 minutes a day on exercise, you likely don’t want to spend all this time on doing 1000 crunches.
There are many other workouts that offer more results in a shorter amount of time. Even something like 30 crunches a day could be effective for many people with enough extra resistance.
1,000 crunches a day challenge results
By now it should be clear that doing this many crunches a day is typically not recommended. Even so, there are a variety of people that give this routine a change for a week or a month to see what happens.
In the video below you can discover what results Gabby from the Youtube channel Gabserel got from doing a 1000 crunches a day challenge like this for a week.
Is 1000 crunches a day good enough?
Depending on your current strength level and how you do them, 1000 crunches a day can be good enough to grow and strengthen your ab muscles.
At the same time, you want to keep in mind that shorter crunch workouts, potentially with weights, can offer similar results in a shorter amount of time.
Besides these things, 1000 crunches a day can also help you improve ab muscle endurance and burn a few extra calories.
If you are interested in fitness goals like losing weight, overall health, and building muscle in other areas, you likely want to consider other types of workout routines.
For these purposes, only doing 1000 crunches a day is often not enough.
FAQ
Can you get a six-pack by doing 1000 crunches?
1000 crunches can help you get a more visible six-pack if your body fat percentage is low enough. That being said, many other ab workout routines will be more time-efficient. Additionally, 1000-crunch workouts are not good to get to a low body fat percentage.
Is it OK to do 1000 crunches?
Doing 1000 crunches may lead to some muscle soreness but it will be OK for many people. That being said, in some cases it will not be OK and it will generally not be that effective either. You likely want to consider other workouts.
