Visible ones that is, unless you’re the hollow man, everyone has abs.
I have SO many clients come to me telling me they want to ‘lose weight’ & ‘tone up’
Tends to be the overriding theme of peoples goals when they first start working with me.
Understandable, diet culture has been so engrained in us all that very few women come to me and say, you know what Nerissa…. I want to get REALLY fucking strong and eat as much food as I can in the process.
HOWEVER, this is normally their goal after working with me for a few weeks. It entails a shift in mindset away from skinny and over to STRONG #strongnotskinny and also towards #nonscalevictories.
Before I talk about the title of this post, here is one thing that when done alone won’t get you visible abs. Hundreds of crunches & core workouts.
As someone who used to KILL themselves doing core workouts every day, I can honestly tell you, there is a better way, I PROMISE. I swear part of the reason I suffer with my back sometimes is because of the ridiculous core workouts I used to do every day with no regard, whatsoever, for developing the strength in any other part of my body.
THE ONLY CORE WORKOUTS I DO THESE DAYS ARE THE ODD ONES WE THROW IN AS PART OF STRENGTH TRAINING IN MY CLASSES ON A SATURDAY.
I want to highlight, I am not against core workouts and if you enjoy them, by all means go for it, but don’t be fooled like me by thinking that alone is going to give you a ripped V line!
When they say ‘Abs are made in the kitchen’, they are not wrong. You can be hammering out all the training in the world, if you are not in a calorie deficit, you are not going to lose body fat. I am a PT, not a nutritionist, so I tread lightly when I discuss any aspects of nutrition.
One thing I will say though is, whether you track or don’t track your calories, that is up to you. But if you are not dropping body fat and are training like a mad thing, I advise you to take a look at the food side of things, from an energy balance perspective, you are probably consuming more calories than you are burning.
Something as a PT I can discuss with the utmost confidence is the importance of RESISTANCE TRAINING.
IF your goal is weight/fat loss. I cannot stress the importance of resistance training enough! You may burn more calories in your 20-minute cardio/HIIT workout (which I am not against, by any means, especially if you enjoy it), but in order to get more lean muscle into that beautiful body of yours – 𝐑𝐄𝐒𝐈𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐍𝐂𝐄 𝐓𝐑𝐀𝐈𝐍𝐈𝐍𝐆 & 𝐏𝐑𝐎𝐆𝐑𝐄𝐒𝐒𝐈𝐕𝐄𝐎𝐕𝐄𝐑𝐋𝐎𝐀𝐃. 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐦𝐨𝐫𝐞 𝐦𝐮𝐬𝐜𝐥𝐞 𝐰𝐞 𝐡𝐚𝐯𝐞 = 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐦𝐨𝐫𝐞 𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐛𝐨𝐝𝐢𝐞𝐬 𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐧𝐚𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐲 𝐛𝐮𝐫𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐦𝐨𝐫𝐞 𝐜𝐚𝐥𝐨𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐬, 𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐧 𝐰𝐡𝐞𝐧 𝐰𝐞 𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐬𝐢𝐭𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐝𝐨𝐰𝐧, 𝐛𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐢𝐧𝐠 Netflix.
I could write an essay on this topic, but I’ll park it there for now. If you are someone who feels they are getting nowhere with the type of training they are doing I urge you to take a step back and figure out what isn’t working.
As Einstein says - “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”