I've been working out a lot but haven't seen progress in my lower stomach/gut area.
Is there a solution to tighten up the mid section of a middle aged male? I want to get back to my prime. The gut area is just too much. My front profile is decent, but side... no good.
No carbs? No sugar at all (tears). No hope? not me... boom chuka lucka... boom!
Sprinting always helped to keep my midsection in check while being far from perfect with my nutrition. Of course, I can't put away multiple large pizzas and can after can of sodas like I used to as a teen and still maintain flat washboard abs. I've had to compromise a bit on nutrition to maintain that over the passing years, and I'll likely have to compromise even more on that a decade from now. Yet I've never had to go so extreme as to cut out almost all sugar or go on drastic dietary restrictions that almost entirely cut out a macro such as keto. I've never had to measure my food on a food scale and try to hit some precise caloric target to lean down or stay lean.
I might be a bit gifted genetically but I'm not immune to growing a gut. I've grown a rather impressive gut twice: once in university and another in my early years of marriage. Both times didn't involve any major change in nutrition except that I dropped my physical training for a few years in a row. I resumed the training and the gut went away quite quickly.
That said, I don't believe in "exercising". I'm thoroughly allergic to the notion. I can probably count the times I attempted to "exercise" on my fingers, and it didn't "work" for me in terms of fat loss. I do believe firmly in "training" as an athlete. People are quick to point out that you can erase the calorie output of the hardest exercise session by just eating a few cookies. Yet that's viewing the energy equation with the calorie output being a constant and plateaued over time and no long-term results gained that affect it.
If you "train" rather than "exercise", you can gradually raise that energy expenditure in a way where you average more calories burned the following month than the previous and not just when you are training. You will become lighter and springier and explosive on your feet. You will want to sit less and move more. You'll cease to struggle as much to get out of bed and instead be able to kip-up out of bed and be ready to move. When you listen to music you'll want to dance. When you're around kids at a playground, you end up gaining the energy to play with them and not just watch them play. You can look at fat loss more in terms of gradually raising caloric output rather than reducing caloric input.
To "train" means you cease to become so focused on how your body looks. Fat loss isn't even the goal. Your goal is performance. You don't sprint a hundred meters over and over to lose fat. You do it to get faster. You don't curl weights to get bigger-looking biceps. You do it to be able to curl more in the future. You measure yourself and compare yourself to athletes. You repeat with the goal of getting faster, and you will get faster if you stick to it.
Try to forget about the gut and focus on performance. Who cares about how a gut looks anyway? I didn't find my wife or people treating me any worse when I had a gut. But I do care a lot and I'm a bit vain having come from the background of a competitive athlete about my 100m dash times. And I think this type of vanity -- if we are to be vain -- is at least more productive for fat loss than focusing so much on how our body appears. One of the reasons is that you'll be met with progress after progress. The gut might take its due time to disappear but it doesn't take months or years of training to notice athletic improvements. And I've found if you get caught up focusing on that, the guy will disappear before you know it. You look down one day in a shower and find that what was once a gut sticking out is now a flat washboard, and you almost don't care because you're too focused on getting stronger and faster.
[...] if you get caught up focusing on that, the [/gut] will disappear before you know it. [...]
I also think as we age that many men focus on bulking. We can subscribe to the most hardcore bodybuilder mindset while neglecting mobility and flexibility. But I don't think that's the easiest way to lose the gut. That definitely works but those bodybuilder and fitness model types often have to eat and train as though their livelihood depends on it (and it very well might for many of them).
The easiest way in my opinion is to focus on being limber, fast, light on your feet. If you can't kick as high as you could as a teenager you might want to focus on improving that flexibility. Open up your body's full range of motions so that you don't feel so heavy and stiff. Turn that body into a full athletic bundle of energy like a hyperactive kid after a sugar rush at the playground. Aging doesn't reduce our strength so much as it makes us stiff and slow and reluctant to play. So train to become limber and fast and embrace the inner child that wants to play.
I think that might be the most effective way for at least some people. It is for me anyway.
And finally, try to become light in the mind. As we age we accumulate more experiences. Some will be very negative: disappointments, heartbreaks, traumas. We dwell on it and we carry more weight that slows us down just like that gut which slows us down. And that can negatively impact your energy, stress levels, motivation, and desire to play.
Each day is a chance to be reborn as I see it and have a day so fun that it burns a positive experience into our memories. Become lighter on your feet and lighter in the mind, and then you can still indulge in some food pleasures here and there. You'll be burning enough energy through the day to afford it.
Sound advice. Perfect is better and where I usually think but I see part of me not improving. Hiit exercise I’ll do kore of… but it’s touchy… easy to get hurt and long to recover. 40 is way diff than 55 for me. Mind is important as well good point.
One thing for me is that I don't do HIIT the way it's prescribed. I think that's in the "exercise" realm still focusing on fat loss. Neither I nor other sprinters on my track team trained that way like sprinting our hearts out then resting 15 secs then trying to sprint again. We'd train with much, much longer rest intervals between sprints, and not necessarily sprinting full speed every single day, and always starting with warm-ups and stretches. We erred on the side of resting too long than too little since we're always trying to get the best times with each sprint, so you want to be extremely well-rested.
It's kind of like the difference between a powerlifter and a bodybuilder. Bodybuilders are always pushing their bodies towards the limits: always favoring very short rest intervals and working very close to form/muscle failure. That can chisel out a godly body but it requires epic discipline.
So I'm in favor of resting a whole lot and even training twice a day like once before work, once after work, or even three or four times a day on weekends. But with a careful eye towards measurable performance improvements. This does require more time devoted throughout the day but most of it is spent resting and recovering, and if it's something like sprinting you can do it wherever. You can do it on the way to the store and back.
But I do suspect things are gonna get really uphill in my 50s. 40s already seems like it's working towards an exponential curve in difficulty compared to my 30s. And I might very well develop a gut by this point and find myself in a similar boat. Yet I still think the easiest way out of that boat might be more like this.
I have a variety of reasons for my thoughts and decided on an approach of just sharing my more unorthodox ones since there's no shortage of fitness advice out there. But one of the reasons is because I have this brother-in-law who is a gym rat in his late 40s and he's awesome and huge. He looks like a linebacker and not such a fat one, although he does have an impressive gut. But accompanied by the gut is a thick chest, monster traps, powerful back, biceps the size of my head.
Yet he also has chronic ankle problems. That's a lot of weight he carries to put on that joint. He's not very flexible or mobile. We went to Disney Land one time together with kids and he was the one struggling just to walk. He needed to sit down the most. So I think that type of body has a hard time burning lots of energy outside the gym. I could very well imagine struggling more with body fat if I had to carry that sort of load. It'd be like if I strapped a 50+ lbs weighted vest on my body and had to do everything all day with that. I don't think I'd get a better workout. I'd find myself sitting and lying down a whole lot more outside the motivated hour or two at the gym.
So that's one reason why I think it's easier to work towards light and springy and flexible and explosive. By "light", I mean in a relative sense. We don't have to drop pounds to become light on our feet. We just have to get enough power and endurance in the legs to carry our weight with ease. I also think that's what we're losing more with age.
I can actually open a pickle jar more easily now than in my teens and mass came. I filled out my shirts, especially towards my 30s. What I've been losing more with age is that limber and flexible and energetic side. So I think that's what we have to fight more to regain.
If you're genetically predisposed to storing fat in your midsection first then the only way to get rid of the fat there is to burn off what's stored everywhere else until it begins to shrink.
You need to be certain it is actually fat too. Some conditions of the spine, scheurmann's syndrome for example, push the spine forward in the midsection, which in turn pushes the "gut" forward and creates a bulge. You'd need an MRI to confirm that diagnosis but it can explain why you don't get the shape you want. I have it and even after a 3 month coma that dropped me from over 200lbs to under 150lbs at 6' tall I looked like I had a big gut despite my body fat dropping to around 5% thanks to my spine.
"Target" exercising doesn't work per se as you just burn fat in the reverse order you store it, so although you strengthen that muscle group it doesn't show until overall fat percentage drops to the point of burning it off.
Reduced carbs intake definitely helps, replace with protein and fats that your body uses to build muscle and burn for fuel.
Get your testosterone levels checked. As we age we produce less, which increases the relative level of estrogen, which causes fat gain. From experience the best testosterone booster supplement available is Testofuel. It's expensive, but it restored my T levels to normal after a couple of months use. Combined with low carb diet and exercise that's target to maintain lean muscle mass (not necessarily build it) a higher testosterone level can boost overall health, and naturally produced is way healthier than testosterone injections (they'll shrink your balls)!
Unfortunately, some people genetically store fat on the mid section of their body. I am one of them. Your diet contributes 75-80% of it. As you age, your metabolism is slower so you need to be strict on your meals. You don’t get flat tummy from the gym, but mostly from the kitchen. I have experimented different methods of ways to get rid of it. I figured this out. There is no amount of workouts that can get you a flat belly until you lost your overall body fat and it has to be certain weight range yes. Avoid drastic weight lost because you will leave your skin saggy which needs you to work harder later on. Cardio+low carbs diet OR intermittent fasting (12-16 hours) work wonder. You can combine some weight training too in between, and make sure you get enough rest. Avoid too much of dairy products, food with high refined carbs and the most importantly the enemy of belly is…. sugar. Not even brown sugar is considered healthy. Eat more food with high fibre and protein. If you don’t see progress as you mentioned above, something is not right with your diet. You need to check your fridge. I wish you all the best!
Only by strictly adhering to a diet. You can’t just eat healthy. Because you’ll just eat more healthy food to compensate for calories.
You have to make a detailed exercise and diet plan. Where you calculate and know how many calories you consume and burn. Every 3500 calories in deficit is one pound lost. Make sure you get enough protein and fat. To match what your body needs. The deficit needs to come from carbs. So your body consumes body fat not muscle.
It’s really easy to trick yourself into thinking you are doing good. That’s why everything needs to be known, measured and quantified.
There's no quick solution. A person does the wrong things over a long period of time to gain weight, so it takes doing the right things over a long period of time to get back to normal. Eating smaller amounts and exercising regularly will slowly, but surely work.
I've been taking some keto stuff for the past 5 months and actually HAVE lost about 60 lbs.! But, I'm SURE I'd have lost a LOT more, by now, if I was still in the band, or could at least play drums here as much as I want, or could go out for walks or a swim. I USED to ALWAYS be about 185 to 195 lbs. until about 15 years ago when I started packing it on because I no longer had a bike to ride, a band to play in, a girlfriend to fuck several times a week, a pool to spend all day in, a job I could bust ass doing and a place to go take long walks, like I used to. I lost all of that at about the exact same time and ballooned up to 365!! As of a week ago, I'm down to about 290. If I can drop at least another 50 or 60, that'd be great!!
As far as I know body fat disappears where it wants to as you lose weight. Maybe it's choosing to disappear there last. What is your body fat? I'd start there. At the end of the day it might be just your genetics. I'm no expert by any means. But I was losing weight a couple years. ago. Out of nowhere I just hit a wall and couldn't lose another pound. It took me a couple years and losing some ground but it turned out it was a combination of I had developed hypothyroidism and sleep apnea. And I'll tell anyone who'll listen that good sleep is critical to losing weight.
Straight from a trash textbook. A person who drinks beer and gets a gut can cut the beer and the gut goes away, just gotta find what the cause is and eliminate it, seen it done. Is my opinion valid or am I not qualified enough?
Hey there. Nice to see you again. Well, that all depends on where people store their fat. A person's genetics is what determines that.
So if a person's body primarily stores fat in their stomach area, then cutting out that beer can reduce that fat.
You're definitely right. My dad is guilty of the beer gut. That's just where he stores his fat. He cut down on beer a few years ago and the beer gut disappeared like you said. He has since picked it back up and it returned, but that's beside the point lol.
Do squats. Start out with 2 sets of 25 reps. Do that two days per week for a couple weeks, then increase it to two sets of 50 reps twice per week. Expect to continue with that for 3 months consistently and you will see results.
You shouldn't have to change your diet at all. It worked for me years ago. Squats seemed to be very effective in losing fat. If you wear jeans though, expect them to get pretty tight on the legs.
I do crunches, cardio , high protein diet, and there is an inch of fat around my abs that just set up shop 20 years ago and refuses to budge. I will not get liposuction but that is probably what it would take.
I always learned to eat smaller portions/drink lots of water / stay away from a lot of diet soda ( pop ) if you eat sweets lower what you eat and try to limit sweets but I find drinking lots of water lowers my blood sugars and helps me lose water weight also eat more veggies
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You need to cut beer out, cut bread out, cut dairy out, eat less, eat less fatty foods. Vacuum sucks helped me along with, planks, crunches etc. https://youtu.be/JZsleAC7O28
Nutrition and constant switching workout routines. Several trainers I had told me how our body adapts to patterns in workouts and you’ll stop building muscle. It’s weird. But you have to change tracks every week and workout the whole body. Can’t just focus on glamour muscles.
And nutrition is like 80% really. Water and protein.
Who gets to decide what is misinformation and what is not? Ah, the news outlets you follow and the politicians on your side, right? So basically you and your team get to make the rules. Yeah fuck that, there are legions of suppressed scientists and doctors speaking out against what we and they believe to be misinformation surrounding these so called vaccines. The data is not on your side. To argue otherwise proves you haven’t looked into it or don’t have the capacity to discern truth in a sea of lies, because that’s the situation a seeker is faced with these days
@Shamalien Right. When you finally get Covid (and you will) be sure to use Hydroxychloroquine and Imectin, and when you get long QT syndrome and your heart quits - don't act surprised. Your fear and narcissism will have been the end of you.
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