Over the course of the last couple weeks, I have been trying to survive a 30-day ab challenge. I wanted to see if a normal person with college commitments could actually do it and incorporate it into their schedule. I wanted to see if I would actually see results after only doing the bare minimum. After the course of the last month, I do believe that it is possible to see results from these types of 30-day challenges.

When I started this challenge, I had absolutely no definition in my stomach at all. However, now, whenever I flex or after my workouts, the definition is definitely noticeable to me, and I have noticed that I am still a little sore since day 22.

The hard thing about an ab challenge that you only complete once a day is that you aren’t going to see extreme results or weight loss, which is not what this challenge promised anyway. Most people just believe that they will have extreme results. If that is what you want, then you should incorporate more cardio into your workouts as you go along. Three to five days of cardio a week should be enough to see changes after a month for those types of workouts.

I went to the rec center once this week, and I went for a run on Sunday. If you want to really clear your head and sweat, I think a longer cardio workout is more efficient, but if you only do cardio you won’t see pronounced muscle definition in your abs. I ended up only doing other cardio workouts twice, because as every student knows, the week before spring break is extremely hectic.

I still believe that the workouts are really fun. They got me to do things like bicycle crunches and long arm crunches, which are moves that I would not have done by myself. I would have probably stuck to a bland crunch if this workout hadn’t opened my horizons to different types of moves. I also really liked doing planks because I actively felt my muscles working.

I lived a normal life during this experience/experiment. Sickness, holidays, family visits, birthdays, homework, practicals, tests and many other normal things happened to me during this experience, and I still felt like I had time to do most of my workouts. I overall feel like most people could incorporate this in some way in their life. I really want to continue doing this after I am done writing these articles, and I still have two workouts to complete when I go home for spring break but it is the end of the month.

Although I am happy with the results of the overall testing, there are some things that I wished I had done differently. I wish I had started the challenge by doing two workouts a day instead of just one. I believe I would have seen more pronounced results if I had done this. I could have done them like sets. I feel like if I had not been sick during this experiment that it would have gone so much better but even with being sick I still feel definition. I just think that I could have used that consistency to see more results, but again this is a normal thing that happens to people.