If you have been exercising and working on your nutrition to improve your abdominal looks, you may come across an issue where you are losing weight, arms and legs looks good but not the tummy. Common approach is changing the diet, do more abs, and so on. Although this tweak may help but issue can be, not always, due to something else. In this article I will put together possible causes of why you may still have a pouch in the mid-section.
There are 3 things that must happen to have a strong and well-shaped abs.
First is reducing body fat that is surrounding and underneath the abdomen. With the layer of fat between skin and the muscles, no matter how much ab workout you do, you may not be able to see them.
Second is training your abdominal region. You will need muscle mass and mobilize muscles for better blood circulation, which will be important for keeping the muscles healthy.
Lastly, stretching the muscles that are tight which cause the abdominal region to be pushed out. This may not be able to accomplish just by strength training, especially when the muscles are already tight.
Reducing Fat
Although you may hear the term “abs are made in kitchen”, yet it is not entirely accurate. There are several things that must work with nutrition that would influence the reduction of body fat in both subcutaneous and visceral around the abdominal region.
First common issue is hormonal issue, especially stress hormone called cortisol. Cortisol is a stress hormone, secreted in adrenal glands which is located above the kidney and behind the stomach. It is a vital hormone for us. It helps increase awareness, focus, and energy by increasing the production of adrenaline. Cortisol is very important hormone, however, when the cortisol is elevated for extended period 1.) thyroid function decreases and 2.) lead to insulin resistance. Which means metabolic rate are decreased and blood sugar and insulin level is elevated. This makes fat loss hard. Habits to fix are nutrition, sleep, water intake and cardio.
For fat loss, controlling eating amount or caloric intake is important, however, you should start with eliminating packaged and junk food as much as you can rather than restricting calories. These foods are typically highly processed or recent term would be ultra-processed. Before thinking about calories, reduce your food intake to 3 meals per day and stick with whole foods, limit processed food, for 3 month and you should see some fat loss starting to happen.
Sleep is one of daily habit that we know it is important but not practiced well. If you are sleeping less than 7 hours, you should not expect to lose fat especially visceral fat. Short sleep is nothing to be bragged about nor sign of toughness. It actually lowers your testosterone level, immune system, and elevate your stress level which can add more fat to your midsection.
If you want to be muscular you should know that muscle is made of 75% water. Which means, drinking water helps promote muscle growth significantly. Protein or amino acids are building blocks of muscles but so is water. Caffeinated, alcoholic, and sugary beverages should not count as your water intake for they remove water from the body rather than retain. If you are constipated, along with increase fiber intake you want to drink more water.
Daily walk for 15-30 minutes does wonders. Yes, it is cardio and I know what "experts" say about cardio for fat loss. However, if you want to create body that consistently burning fat you should train your body to use fat as energy. Yes, they are energy and you can use them. Low intensity cardio can help the mitochondria to be more efficient in using fat as energy source. Tip is walk at the fastest pace yet able to have a conversation. Remember, higher the intensity promotes more of carbohydrate usage in mitochondria, not the fat, though it is important to train in both.
Training Abdomen
Abdominal exercises such as crunches and sit ups may not help with belly fat reduction but they can help shape the abdominal muscles and make your belly look great once you reduce your belly fat.
There are several muscles that shapes the abdominal region. Crunches and sit ups primarily work on rectus abdominis, which is also known as six packs. There are abdominal obliques and transverse abdominis that sits on the side of the rectus abdominis. These muscles help with the trimmed look and exercises can be lateral crunches and twists.
These are common muscles that if you have been working out you may have heard of. There are smaller muscle groups that we don’t typically hear. They are diaphragm, psoas, and iliacus. Diaphragm sit right below the bottom portion of rib cages and when it is weak, the top portion of abdomen tends to hang out. Psoas and iliacus are known as hip flexors. May seem to have nothing to do with abdomen, however, there origin starts in the lumbar region of the spine which will be opposite side from rectus abdominis. When these muscles are tight or weak, overall abdomen will look like it is pushed forward.
What I have illustrated here is importance of varying the abdominal exercises so that you can shape the belly more efficiently. It is also important to emphasis that abdominal muscles are like other muscles and should be treated equally. For example, when you do your ab training today you should give it a rest for at least 24 hours just like how you do with other muscle groups. You should also train in variations such as bodyweight, resisted, isometric, long lever, and short lever work and so on. Examples are crunch (bodyweight), cable crunch (resisted), plank (isometric), hanging leg raise (long lever), and hanging knee raise (short lever). There are so many ab routines online for free so find the one that has variations.
Stretching and Mobilize the Muscles
When the muscles in abdominal region are tight not only it looks stiff but also can lead to lower back pain and pushed out more even when you are on top of exercise and diet.
Common tightness that I see in my clients that affect abdominal shape are psoas, piriformis, obliques, and rectus abdominis.
Video will show some of the exercises I use for my clients. First 2 exercises are to stretch and mobilize the tight piriformis and psoas and last 2 is using breathing exercise to train muscles that we don't normally train which are diaphragm and intercostal muscles. There two muscles may help with more slender figure.
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