8 Reasons Your Abs Aren't Showing

 8 Reasons Your Abs Aren't Showing

If your abs aren't showing after doing tons of crunches and eating clean it can be very discouraging. Being stuck at this in between phase where you have a slim waist but either no abs or just a faint outline of the top two abs, is actually a very common problem but by fixing the issues that are preventing you from seeing your abs you can quickly start making progress towards a more defined looking midsection with abs that clearly show.

So lets start with the most obvious issue which is body fat percentage. The amount of fat you have on your body will play one of the biggest impacts on how visible your abs are. Unfortunately the belly area is one of the last spots to drop fat so you'll see fat reduction from your face, hands, and arms long before you see it coming off your stomach. The key is to be consistent with your diet and to stick to a calorie deficit made up of healthy single ingredient foods for long enough for the fat to start coming off of the areas close to your center of mass. No matter how hard you work your abs of you have a layer of fat covering your abs your abs are just not going to show. Now you mightve been told to get your body fat percentage under 12 percent as a man to see your abs, but this exact measurement strategy is flawed. Some men will start seeing well defined abs at 14 percent and others will have to cut more body fat.

This is due to the fact that different people have different bodies that have different preferential fat storage patterns. So if your body loves to store and retain fat specifically around the midsection you'll have to cut down further than someone who primarily stores fat around his hips. The solution to this is to once again stay consistent with reducing calories by eating healthy calorie dense foods like lean sources of protein, veggetables, and fruits for long enough until your body fat percentage is low enough to have thise abs pop out more.   Now if your diet is good and you're starting to get lean you could be making many different mistakes during your workouts that prevent your abs from growing properly. For example one of the biggest issues I see with ab workouts is that most people don't use enough weight to train their abs and instead they perform way Too Many Reps. This belief that you should train your abs with high reps stems from the false idea that they are slow-twitch fiber dominant. And the best way to stimulate slow twitch fibers is with a lot of reps. Well turns out that first of all, research shows you'll build more muscle when you train with a variety of reps instead of always using the same number. (6)