I've always been tall and thin, with a flat stomach my entire life. No matter what ab exercises I did (planks, bicycle crunches, etc) my abs never grew to be visible.
That all changed when I got an ab wheel. Instead of the widely harped "abs are trained by sustained exercises", the ab wheel turned it into the "until muscle failure" that you use for all the other muscle groups for body building. Within a few weeks for repeated muscle failure with rests I went from completely flat to what you have in your pictures.
The 2 most important things are proper form to ensure you target only your abs (no back, shoulders, legs, or arms) and to repeat until failure. In other words, no different than any other single-muscle-group exercise.
Muscle failure promotes muscle growth, if kneeling fails to reach failure in a timely manner then it's time to do standing rollouts. You mention doing 7/8/1 reps with other exercises, then wildly jump up to 75 with abs. Why give abs a special treatment when it should be treated no different than any other muscle group? For standing rollouts, start small if you have to, only rolling out a couple dozen cm, but general principle is the same as all body building: maintain control, target the muscle, and reach failure timely.
You mention doing 7/8/1 reps with other exercises, then wildly jump up to 75 with abs. Why give abs a special treatment when it should be treated no different than any other muscle group?
That's just because of the nature of the exercise. Jumping from kneeling to standing is a huge jump and I am training to do it standing in the way you described.
And I do some "half" dragon flags too.
I just mentioned the 30+ reps to say that I don't think lack of abs size is my main problem here because if I press and run my finger when flexing I can feel the abs muscles really well. They are definitely not small.
I think at this point it’s probably more of a fat percentage issue than the actual muscles. You should try calculating your fat percentage, around 12% is when they truly start to appear visible. By your photos, you look like you’re somewhere around the 15% range Body fat percentage for me
Trainers always say abs are made in the kitchen, not the gym. You probably have a great set of abs hiding just underneath a little too much fat. Keep going though, you’re super close!
Photos of men with defined six-pack abs are frequently taken after a period of dehydration to accentuate them, in addition to getting to quite low body fat percentages. So if you want a single day with a really good picture, that would be a strategy. This is probably not good for your general health and fitness though -- I would generally recommend focusing on that rather than specifically on defined abs. Your abs look pretty good already in the pictures you send imo, fwiw.
Bad advice that I do not recommend but used in practice: a water cut and some alcohol can dehydrate you enough to display muscles. Ronnie Coleman avoided any type of drinking and kept losing Mr. Olympia until someone convinced him to drink a bit the night before the show.
Probably not the story you were looking for but perhaps it may provide insight.
I used to have visible abs during high school and up until very recently, but that was just because I was underweight with a higher metabolism and occasionally skipped meals. I didn't work out or anything, most physical activity was just for PE classes or occasional outdoor tomfoolery with friends. During HS specifically, a lot of peers seemed to be impressed by my abs, and once or twice I even had classmates ask to touch them (which I obliged, but I was quite socially awkward at the time so I didn't know what to do with potential signals of interest). I found the occasional positive attention nice, but I was only 120-125lbs (54-57kg) and 5'10 and I honestly felt like I needed to gain weight for the longest time (and still do today tbh). My mom always told me to eat a sandwich and "get some meat on my bones" when I'd visit... I picked up quite a few insecurities from her comments over the years but that's another subject.
At one point, I had my body fat percentage measured in a Weights class and it was at like 5%. My weight hovered up to 130lbs(59kg) after graduating high school but I'd have to practically force myself to eat to get appreciably above that.
Some self discoveries since then and a year of cross sex hormone therapy to date, I've gained another 10lbs. The abs aren't clearly visible anymore, but honestly, I'm more at peace with my body now than I ever was in the past. For me personally it gets better the more progress I make towards the upper middle "healthy" BMI ranges.
But of course, since I didn't have to work for it earlier on in life, I didn't particularly see visible abdominals as such a big deal in the first place. I definitely feel like I got the better end of the stick overall because there's less social stigma about being skinny but, as a consequence, I felt like more of my body image concerns weren't taken seriously. If I wanted, I might be able to get visible abs again if I started doing exercises for it, but they're far from the top of my personal priority list at the moment.
I guess the takeaway is that it's pretty closely tied in with weight and body fat percentage as other people in this thread mention. I guess you could also just refuse to lean your back against anything and not slouch when sitting down like I did throughout most of my life until recent years, but that could also have some potential back health impacts that I don't feel like doing research on right now.
My body type is mostly lean (mostly due to genetics, probably), but I was never really athletic, so I have a bit of belly fat and not much muscle tone. I've just been working on improving my muscles in recent years. I got visible ab muscles when I was doing a lot of plank variations (mostly the one where I'm moving between a regular plank and something that looks like a plank with downward dog pose) and hollow body / dead bug variations. That was pre-pandemic, and then I gained like 7 lbs during the pandemic and haven't gotten the defined abs back since then 😂
Bro you already got abs! Hard to tell if it would be 4 or 6 pack with more dehydration and a more extreme cut, but you look amazing and shouldn't be so hard on yourself.
With that being said if you want more definition you're at a point where it's not going to be particularly healthy to do so. The only way they are going to get more defined is by dehydrating yourself or continuing to lose fat. You're at the point that your body will absolutely fight you if you try to lose more weight, however, and you will almost assuredly lose muscle along with the fat at that low of a bodyfat %. If you decide to take that route be sure to maximize your protein intake and maybe even look into an EC stack to really push your body to preserve muscle while you're cutting.
Steroids. Roughly 100% of the abs you see on TV or in print are directly or indirectly related to steroids. And a lot of models use the loophole that they don't take steroids... Anymore. Nevermind that you can keep your gains from steroids to a certain degree long after stopping. But even taking steroids to supplement your routine isn't enough. You also need to dehydrate yourself severely on photoshoot day, and also starve yourself. And don't forget the baby oil and professional style three point lighting to get the shadows just perfect on your abs. And your diet needs to run extremely unhealthy towards staying in permanent starvation mode where you don't ingest any carbohydrates at all, forcing your body to freak out and start eating itself.
Abs are not normal for 99% of humans. They just aren't. You have really fuck your body up to get really good looking abs. If you look at professional fighters who can't take steroids because they get tested, they often have one packs or even what seems to be a keg belly. This is a solid wall of muscle with a thin layer of fat.
When I was in the best shape of my life and had an unstoppable metabolism and was literally unable to gain weight, I only had a one pack. And so did literally everyone else I knew at a young age that was trying to get cut.
If you want abs you can definitely get them, but it really needs to be worth it for you and I recommend taking steroids that are legal. There are plenty of steroids or hormones you can take that are safe and legal and are only banned by sporting authorities. Even just testosterone therapy may work. You just have to talk to a MD about it (and NOT a health and nutrition PhD)
I'm going to recommend two different exercises which I think will help. While I do a lot of different exercise, the two of the three I do every day are the key to my abs. They are the ab wheel (as mentioned above in another comment) and burpees with a pull up bar.
Ab wheel is self explanatory, just get one and start slowly and work your way up. You can Google proper way to do it but the key is to do it slowly and correctly before you start adding more and more reps.
For burpees, you can also do a quick YouTube search and you'll see how they work. The only difference I do is instead of just jumping up, I jump up and reach for a pull up bar and then do a pull up.
Between these two exercises, my stomach, chest, and shoulders are tight and exhausted.
I had sick abs when I was 0% body fat haha ( 5'9" 115 pounds)
Now that I've put on some muscle and fat (up to 178 now) my abs are a distant memory. I think you need to be really lean to even approach having a good set of abs and from what I've read a lot of it can be genetics too.
I am maintaining now at 72kg and my abs are a little more visible than the pictures I posted here. Maybe since I upped my calories a little the muscles filled a little? Who knows. Maybe It's in my head.
When i flex in the morning I can see it and even not flexing with the right lighting I can see some contour. I'm pretty content with this right now and will keep this weight for two or three months until my lifts stall. Then I'll up my calories and slow bulk a little.
I've always been tall and thin, with a flat stomach my entire life. No matter what ab exercises I did (planks, bicycle crunches, etc) my abs never grew to be visible.
That all changed when I got an ab wheel. Instead of the widely harped "abs are trained by sustained exercises", the ab wheel turned it into the "until muscle failure" that you use for all the other muscle groups for body building. Within a few weeks for repeated muscle failure with rests I went from completely flat to what you have in your pictures.
The 2 most important things are proper form to ensure you target only your abs (no back, shoulders, legs, or arms) and to repeat until failure. In other words, no different than any other single-muscle-group exercise.
Muscle failure promotes muscle growth, if kneeling fails to reach failure in a timely manner then it's time to do standing rollouts. You mention doing 7/8/1 reps with other exercises, then wildly jump up to 75 with abs. Why give abs a special treatment when it should be treated no different than any other muscle group? For standing rollouts, start small if you have to, only rolling out a couple dozen cm, but general principle is the same as all body building: maintain control, target the muscle, and reach failure timely.
That's just because of the nature of the exercise. Jumping from kneeling to standing is a huge jump and I am training to do it standing in the way you described.
And I do some "half" dragon flags too.
I just mentioned the 30+ reps to say that I don't think lack of abs size is my main problem here because if I press and run my finger when flexing I can feel the abs muscles really well. They are definitely not small.
I think at this point it’s probably more of a fat percentage issue than the actual muscles. You should try calculating your fat percentage, around 12% is when they truly start to appear visible. By your photos, you look like you’re somewhere around the 15% range Body fat percentage for me
Trainers always say abs are made in the kitchen, not the gym. You probably have a great set of abs hiding just underneath a little too much fat. Keep going though, you’re super close!
Photos of men with defined six-pack abs are frequently taken after a period of dehydration to accentuate them, in addition to getting to quite low body fat percentages. So if you want a single day with a really good picture, that would be a strategy. This is probably not good for your general health and fitness though -- I would generally recommend focusing on that rather than specifically on defined abs. Your abs look pretty good already in the pictures you send imo, fwiw.
Bad advice that I do not recommend but used in practice: a water cut and some alcohol can dehydrate you enough to display muscles. Ronnie Coleman avoided any type of drinking and kept losing Mr. Olympia until someone convinced him to drink a bit the night before the show.
Probably not the story you were looking for but perhaps it may provide insight.
I used to have visible abs during high school and up until very recently, but that was just because I was underweight with a higher metabolism and occasionally skipped meals. I didn't work out or anything, most physical activity was just for PE classes or occasional outdoor tomfoolery with friends. During HS specifically, a lot of peers seemed to be impressed by my abs, and once or twice I even had classmates ask to touch them (which I obliged, but I was quite socially awkward at the time so I didn't know what to do with potential signals of interest). I found the occasional positive attention nice, but I was only 120-125lbs (54-57kg) and 5'10 and I honestly felt like I needed to gain weight for the longest time (and still do today tbh). My mom always told me to eat a sandwich and "get some meat on my bones" when I'd visit... I picked up quite a few insecurities from her comments over the years but that's another subject.
At one point, I had my body fat percentage measured in a Weights class and it was at like 5%. My weight hovered up to 130lbs(59kg) after graduating high school but I'd have to practically force myself to eat to get appreciably above that.
Some self discoveries since then and a year of cross sex hormone therapy to date, I've gained another 10lbs. The abs aren't clearly visible anymore, but honestly, I'm more at peace with my body now than I ever was in the past. For me personally it gets better the more progress I make towards the upper middle "healthy" BMI ranges.
But of course, since I didn't have to work for it earlier on in life, I didn't particularly see visible abdominals as such a big deal in the first place. I definitely feel like I got the better end of the stick overall because there's less social stigma about being skinny but, as a consequence, I felt like more of my body image concerns weren't taken seriously. If I wanted, I might be able to get visible abs again if I started doing exercises for it, but they're far from the top of my personal priority list at the moment.
I guess the takeaway is that it's pretty closely tied in with weight and body fat percentage as other people in this thread mention. I guess you could also just refuse to lean your back against anything and not slouch when sitting down like I did throughout most of my life until recent years, but that could also have some potential back health impacts that I don't feel like doing research on right now.
My body type is mostly lean (mostly due to genetics, probably), but I was never really athletic, so I have a bit of belly fat and not much muscle tone. I've just been working on improving my muscles in recent years. I got visible ab muscles when I was doing a lot of plank variations (mostly the one where I'm moving between a regular plank and something that looks like a plank with downward dog pose) and hollow body / dead bug variations. That was pre-pandemic, and then I gained like 7 lbs during the pandemic and haven't gotten the defined abs back since then 😂
Bro you already got abs! Hard to tell if it would be 4 or 6 pack with more dehydration and a more extreme cut, but you look amazing and shouldn't be so hard on yourself.
With that being said if you want more definition you're at a point where it's not going to be particularly healthy to do so. The only way they are going to get more defined is by dehydrating yourself or continuing to lose fat. You're at the point that your body will absolutely fight you if you try to lose more weight, however, and you will almost assuredly lose muscle along with the fat at that low of a bodyfat %. If you decide to take that route be sure to maximize your protein intake and maybe even look into an EC stack to really push your body to preserve muscle while you're cutting.
Steroids. Roughly 100% of the abs you see on TV or in print are directly or indirectly related to steroids. And a lot of models use the loophole that they don't take steroids... Anymore. Nevermind that you can keep your gains from steroids to a certain degree long after stopping. But even taking steroids to supplement your routine isn't enough. You also need to dehydrate yourself severely on photoshoot day, and also starve yourself. And don't forget the baby oil and professional style three point lighting to get the shadows just perfect on your abs. And your diet needs to run extremely unhealthy towards staying in permanent starvation mode where you don't ingest any carbohydrates at all, forcing your body to freak out and start eating itself.
Abs are not normal for 99% of humans. They just aren't. You have really fuck your body up to get really good looking abs. If you look at professional fighters who can't take steroids because they get tested, they often have one packs or even what seems to be a keg belly. This is a solid wall of muscle with a thin layer of fat.
When I was in the best shape of my life and had an unstoppable metabolism and was literally unable to gain weight, I only had a one pack. And so did literally everyone else I knew at a young age that was trying to get cut.
If you want abs you can definitely get them, but it really needs to be worth it for you and I recommend taking steroids that are legal. There are plenty of steroids or hormones you can take that are safe and legal and are only banned by sporting authorities. Even just testosterone therapy may work. You just have to talk to a MD about it (and NOT a health and nutrition PhD)
I'm going to recommend two different exercises which I think will help. While I do a lot of different exercise, the two of the three I do every day are the key to my abs. They are the ab wheel (as mentioned above in another comment) and burpees with a pull up bar.
Ab wheel is self explanatory, just get one and start slowly and work your way up. You can Google proper way to do it but the key is to do it slowly and correctly before you start adding more and more reps.
For burpees, you can also do a quick YouTube search and you'll see how they work. The only difference I do is instead of just jumping up, I jump up and reach for a pull up bar and then do a pull up.
Between these two exercises, my stomach, chest, and shoulders are tight and exhausted.
And the third exercise I do daily is push ups.
Skittles and black coffee according to Henry Cavill, i.e. extreme dehydration.
Not worth it imo.
I had sick abs when I was 0% body fat haha ( 5'9" 115 pounds)
Now that I've put on some muscle and fat (up to 178 now) my abs are a distant memory. I think you need to be really lean to even approach having a good set of abs and from what I've read a lot of it can be genetics too.
UPDATE:
I am maintaining now at 72kg and my abs are a little more visible than the pictures I posted here. Maybe since I upped my calories a little the muscles filled a little? Who knows. Maybe It's in my head.
When i flex in the morning I can see it and even not flexing with the right lighting I can see some contour. I'm pretty content with this right now and will keep this weight for two or three months until my lifts stall. Then I'll up my calories and slow bulk a little.