Everybody wants to lose belly fat. Some people seem to have perfect abs, while virtually doing nothing. The rest of us are not as lucky. We struggle to get abs. The question is what can you do? No, you do not need to starve yourself or do a thousand crunches (1). Nor, buy some weird new ab machine that looks like something from a BDSM video. I’m going to explain how you can see your abs.

Let Us Start with What Not to Do:

Crazy ab exercise videos and ab routines… Just please stop it. In fact, toss them out the window they are a waste of time, unless you just enjoy them for fun. They will not help you to see your abs.

Yes, those ab exercises you have done for two years, you might feel a burn from. You are not engaging the muscle much nor are following the principle of progressive overload.  What you are really doing is pushing blood into the muscle which gives the false feeling that it is doing something from the pump of blood that is pushed into the muscle.

Progressive Overload:

Progressive overload is a fancy way to say making exercises and routines more challenging over time. We will not go into an article about progressive overload today, as you can use progressive overload in so many ways. Besides, it is not vital to lose belly fat.

So How Do We Engage the Muscle and Will That Work?

If we want to engage the core nothing beats heavy compound movements.  Ab specific exercises do little for your core, other than push blood in the area causing the false impression that the abs are being worked hard. This may sound weird, but you need to first understand what the abs primary purpose is. The abs as well as the lower back are meant to stabilize you.

Logic would dictate, that you need to cause the body to stabilize under more extreme conditions if you want to develop your abs. Holding a heavy barbell on your back as you squat for example involves a lot of stability in your core region plus it is a great leg workout.

Heard This Expression Before:

The Truth About the Kitchen:

Most of the ab results will come from you eating right. Let us get this straight, this does not mean starving. Not only is it an unhealthy route to starve yourself to lose weight, you will end up losing muscle in the process.  In turn you will be making it that much more difficult to have those abs show.  

The best chance to see your abs, however is a healthy diet. A few diets are healthy, many of the fad diets are not. It’s hard to figure out what works, everybody is selling you something. I am not here to sell you anything, I recommend learning how calories work and counting macros. I will make a post on that in the future.

Use this blog as a tool to help you. It is based off my knowledge, science, and ten plus years’ experience training clients to lose weight. You can get all the results you need without paying me anything. If you want to say thank you, send me before and after pictures of the results you get using my information #alphaflexfitness and @alphaflexfitness

Check out some of my recipes for healthy low carbohydrate meals:

• Garlic Paprika Chicken Breast (No Carbs)
• Zucchini Lasagna
• Melty Cheese Omelette

Cut Out Sugars:

I am a strong believer in eating food and enjoying it. I do not like the idea of people starving themselves or not enjoying food. Society has a very odd love hate relationship with food. People like to either overindulge or starve. It is about balance nothing really needs to be taken away, you just need to learn how to balance. I have only one food I recommend taking away and that is sugar.

Why sugar, because sugar has a nasty habit of traveling instantly to be stored as fat on our body. This is often the reason many competitive bodybuilders will avoid fruit. When your bodyfat is excessively low for a competition even the sugar from fruit can add back body fat.

Now I’m not telling anybody to avoid fruit, that is an extreme and this blog isn’t for competitive bodybuilders. What I am saying is avoid sugar loaded drinks, cakes, candy the foods you know point blank are loaded with sugar.

As for fruits they have fructose a moderately healthier sugar and if you are avoiding the junk it should be ok. Fruits also have other health benefits. I do recommend organic fruits if you can afford them, pesticides have a habit of adding body fat by raising our estrogen levels.

Visceral Fat and Subcutaneous Fat:

Our bodies do not spot reduce fat, that is the sad reality. Our bodies tend to lose a little bit all around. To see abs we need to lose the subcutaneous layer of fat around the abdominal wall (3). This is the fat between the skin and muscle. The thinner this layer the more abs and muscles definition will show.

Now this is where things get tricky, we also have visceral fat (2). This fat is under the muscle often found around organs. When you lose this fat, you are way more healthy, however is can hinder abs from showing unless you have exceptionally low bodyfat. When people lose visceral fat the waist shrinks down dramatically but it does little for muscle definition. Sometimes the visceral fat pushes against the muscles bellies and can help abs appear.

This phenomenon may hurt your head to understand but think of anybody, you have seen that appears to have a wide almost bloated waist yet, still has abs showing. More than likely they tend to lose subcutaneous fat (3) easily while holding onto the visceral fat.

I say this so you do not get frustrated if you have a harder time showing your abs meanwhile you have a small waist. In an ideal health conscious world, you would want to lose visceral for health above all else.

 Footnotes:

• Learn about macro nutrition.
• Avoid sugar
• Workout the abs properly by using them how they are meant to be used.
• Lastly understand abs are harder for some than others. Now that you know about the two main kinds of bodyfats. Check to see if your waist is shrinking if you are not noticing abs appearing. If one of those two things aren’t happening, you need to fix your macro nutrition.

Websites Cited

• 1) https://www.quora.com/What-happens-if-you-do-1-000-crunches-a-day
• 2) https://www.healthline.com/health/visceral-fat
• 3)https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/319236#:~:text=Subcutaneous%20fat%20is%20the%20jiggly,is%20associated%20with%20numerous%20diseases.