Doing ab exercises like crunches can be helpful but you still need to get the sets and reps right. Find out whether doing 600 repetitions a day will actually work.
If you get to a point where you can do 600 crunches in one workout (in up to 8 sets), doing this routine every day will generally not help you grow your ab muscles.
Instead, you will improve ab muscle endurance. This can be helpful for your health and daily life too but at the same time, that is often not the goal of people who are considering this exercise routine.
To really grow your ab muscles you want to do sets with fewer crunches and more resistance. You can also consider implementing a rest day in between workouts instead of doing them every single day.
There are also cases where people implement 600 crunches a day because they think it is good for weight loss and more specifically belly fat loss.
However, there are plenty of exercises that are more effective for these goals.
Is doing 600 crunches a day hard enough to grow abs?
Just because they are an ab exercise does not mean that how many crunches you should do to grow abs is not just as many as possible. Less can sometimes be more depending on your goals.
The number of crunches you do with what amount of resistance influences what fitness component you work on.
More specifically, if you can do 600 crunches in one workout, even if you do them in multiple sets, you will likely work more on ab muscle endurance.
This may involve a small amount of actual muscle growth too.
However, you are leaving a lot of results on the table by implementing an exercise routine that is too easy for your strength levels.
Besides that, for bigger muscles like for example your quadriceps, it is generally recommended to implement at least one rest day between resistance training workouts. This gives the muscles time to repair and grow.
However, this is less of an issue for crunches because the smaller ab muscles tend to recover more quickly. Especially when it comes to more endurance-focused workouts like 600 repetitions in one workout.
In short, if you get to a point where you can do 600 crunches in one workout, implementing these into your daily routine will likely not grow your abs but improve muscle endurance instead.
When you can only do these 600 repetitions a day by splitting them into different workouts, for example, 2 sessions of 6 sets of 50 crunches, you could see muscle growth but this also applies to only 1 session like this.
Will 600 crunches help you lose enough belly fat?
Another reason why people consider implementing this many crunches into their exercise is to lose weight and more specifically belly fat.
However, you need to know that what exercises you do generally don’t influence where you lose fat in significant amounts. On top of that, crunches are not great for losing body fat.
Let’s say you do about 30 crunches per minute. In turn, it will take about 20 minutes to do 600 crunches and it would burn more or less the following amounts of calories.
- 125 pounds (56 kg) body weight: 55 calories
- 155 pounds (70 kg) body weight: 68 calories
- 185 pounds (83 kg) body weight: 82 calories
- 215 pounds (97 kg) body weight: 95 calories
You want to compare that to 20 minutes of running at 5.2 mph (8.4 kg) which would burn around 220 calories for a 155-pound person.
It is definitely possible to lose nice amounts of weight while implementing an exercise routine with 600 crunches a day.
However, your fat loss results will mostly have to come from changes in other lifestyle areas like your diet and other exercises you do.
What to do instead
What workout routine you should implement instead depends on your training goals and at what point of your training journey you are.
Improving your ab muscle endurance with 600 crunches a day can be helpful too but many people are interested in other fitness goals.
For example, to get a visible six pack, you first have to lose enough body fat to be able to see your abs.
To achieve this first subgoal, the crunch exercise is not a helpful choice. Instead, you want to do other exercises and focus on other lifestyle habits like the things you eat.
You can already do crunches at this point to grow and strengthen your ab muscles but remember that you will not see a lot of visual results.
Once you have lost enough body fat (or even before that if you want), you can focus on growing your abs. However, even for this, 600 crunches a day is generally not a good routine to grow your abs.
If you are not that experienced and really want to stick to the bodyweight version, something like 200 crunches a day where you really push to failure could give you the results you want.
In reality, you will likely prefer doing shorter sets of crunches with weights to see more results, see faster results, and save yourself some time and discomfort.
