James Leib has always taken care of his body: He was the kind of guy who ran Spartan races and pumped iron daily with a personal trainer. But two years ago, the 48-year-old New Yorker took a job as the director of creative strategy for Banana Republic, a popular clothing store with more than 600 international locations.
The excessive amounts of travel, meetings, and long workdays took a toll on Leib’s body. Before he knew it, he was only hitting the weight room once or twice a week— and he could see and feel the difference. He put on a few pounds (represented in the photo above, which was taken in February) and his athletic build became softer.
Leib knew he needed to find a new routine that worked around his crazy schedule if he wanted get back on track—and he came upon just what he was looking for during a sporadic session with his trainer,
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—is a series of 30-minute workouts specifically developed to help you carve a rock hard six-pack. Leib knew it was exactly what he was looking for, so he signed up and became one of the first people to test the workouts.
For six weeks, Leib gave everything he had to the program. He could feel just how out of shape he had become after the first workout, which left him completely sore afterwards, he recalls. But for three days a week for six weeks, he kept at it.
Speer says the program combines ‘body shaping, ’ a traditional technique used in gymnastics to strengthen the core, with high intensity cardio to carve your abs from the inside while melting fat off the surface. The program wasn’t about doing an agonizing amount of crunches on the floor, but more about incorporating a variety of exercises that work your entire core, Leib explains.
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Since all he needed was one light pair of dumbbells, one heavy pair of dumbbells, and an open floor to get it done, Leib could easily work out on his travel days, too.
“What I liked about the routine was that a lot of it is easily applicable and I’m able to do it on my own, ” he says. “I could replicate it in the gym and if I couldn’t get to the gym I could replicate it in my hotel room because it was a lot of body movement, and stuff you could do even if you didn’t have weights.”
Leib knew he also had to refine his diet if he wanted to see a difference. His frequent traveling was usually accompanied with lots of wine and pasta, so while he was putting Anarchy Abs to the test, Leib cut out all refined carbs. Speer advised him to load up on healthier carbs like sweet potatoes and rice instead. He doubled his servings of chicken and salmon and amped up his vegetable intake with tons of salads.
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By the end of the sixth week, his new diet paired with three Anarchy Abs workouts a week helped Leib shave 1.25 inches of his waist, gain a pound of muscle, and took his single-digit body fat down even further from 7.3 percent to 6.5 percent. (You can see those incredible results at the six-week mark in the after photo above.)
“I was very pleased with the results visibly, but more importantly, my goal was just to kind of get back on track working out and it absolutely helped me do that, ” he says. “I’m finally working out five days a week, even if I travel, so it kind of got me back into my groove that I was in before I took this job.”
He finally likes the way he looks again and as a bonus, the daily movement helps keep him sane from the stress he faces at work. What’s more, Leib is living proof that you can sculpt a chiseled six-pack at any age: “I’m fighting time. I wanted to see what I can do with my body at this age versus what I could do 5 years ago, ” he says.
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“I think it taught me discipline again, ” he says. “If you set a goal and commit to it, you can transform your body, it’s possible, but you have to commit to it. If you’re cheating, you’re only cheating yourself. It takes commitment, it takes follow through—and that’s not just in a span of 6 weeks. It’s a lifestyle.”
, where she leads the brand’s digital editorial strategy. She’s spent the last five years interviewing top medical experts, interpreting peer-reviewed studies, and reporting on health, nutrition, weight loss, and fitness trends for national brands like
. She spends most of her days diving into the latest wellness trends, writing and editing stories about health conditions, testing skincare products, and trying to understand the next greatest internet obsession.
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, which is a pretty big deal. So I researched and found that all the infomercial gadgets that scored higher than the situp were basic versions of the ab wheel rollout or plank. Then, a study came out showing that a group in the military that focused on planks and side planks outperformed a group that focused on situps—in a situp test!
It became clear to me that various forms of stabilization, not traditional abs exercises, are the key to developing stronger abs. Read on, and I’ll share what I’ve discovered about how your midsection really works and the way you need to train it.
The primary purpose of the core—the muscles of the abdomen, including the abs, lower back, and lats—is not to flex the spine, as in crunches and situps, but to stabilize it, preventing the spine from moving. Stuart McGill, a leading expert on lower-back pain, has repeatedly shown that you can work your core more intensely with stability training than with traditional flexion exercises. It’s also safer, because flexing the lumbar spine is the exact same action that can ultimately lead to disc herniation. Let me be 100% clear: I believe so strongly in training stabilization over flexion that I don’t have my clients do any situp or crunch variations anymore. At my training facility, we’ve further broken down core work into three distinct categories:
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The goal here is just to keep your spine straight, so it’s as simple as holding a plank, or side plank, for time. Progressions would include elevating the feet, reducing the base of support (try raising one elbow and the opposite foot off the floor), introducing instability (such as resting your elbows on a Swiss ball), or holding for a longer time.
This is a bit of a misnomer, since dynamic means “moving” and stabilization means “don’t move.” But it also may best describe the true purpose of the core: to stabilize the spine while the extremities are moving. Sample exercises are a front plank with pulldown combo (get into a plank in front of a low cable pulley or resistance band, and pull the handle toward you), ab wheel rollout, mountain climber, and half-kneeling cable chop.
The goal is always to allow zero movement in the spine or core. The core muscles have to control the forces from the extremities and stabilize accordingly. With mountain climbers, for instance, there can be no lumbar flexion at all (the lower back cannot round, a common problem).
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This is where we do traditional exercises with a twist—for example, using one dumbbell instead of two in a lunge or shoulder press. Basically, we off set the center of gravity and force the core to work harder than it would with a traditional exercise. Sample movements would be suitcase walks (a farmer’s walk, like strongmen do, but holding only one dumbbell), Turkish getups, and various lunges and presses with uneven loads (one heavier dumbbell in one hand or weight on one side and not the other).
That’s it. Designing your core workouts with exercises that fit these categories is an effective way to strengthen your abs and build an injury-resistant lower back. They can be used as a single progression—one month you could focus only on pure stabilization, work on dynamic movements the next month, and then finally do integrated stabilization exercises the month after—or as a separate focus on each of your training days. I recommend doing all core
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