There’s a reason trainers are constantly saying, “abs are made in the kitchen”: Because they sure as hell aren’t made in the gym.
What you see—and what you don’t—depends first and foremost on your body fat percentage, says Jarrel Cudjoe, personal trainer and owner of Cudjoe Fitness in LA. “You can be as strong as you want and do as many crunches as possible, but your body fat percentage needs to be at a certain level before you even start to see anything.”
On the flip side, your core strength is about just that: how you train your core muscles (abdominals included). “A lot of people have a six-pack, you just can’t see it,” says trainer Brett Hoebel—who can be credited with sculpting the celebrity abs including those of Robert Downey Jr.
That means you can easily have one and not the other. You can be lean enough that you can count your abs, even if they aren’t particularly strong or bulging. Or you can have a super-strong core, but hidden under a layer of fat, he says.
So, to get both a six-pack and strong core, you need to 1) hit the right body fat percentage and 2) hit the core workouts… hard. Both Hoebel and Cudjoe recommend a combination of core training, fat-burning workouts, and the clean eating (translation: lean means, vegetables, nuts, and no refined “white” foods) to help get there.
Cudjoe recommends aiming for a body fat percentage of about 10 to 12 percent—or 19 to 21 percent if you’re a woman. (FYI, many high-tech scales now allow you to monitor yours.) At that point, you will really start to see how your muscles change with your workouts.
For instance, using heavier resistance with fewer reps will give each of your abs more “size” so they pop out, Hoebel says. And while crunches are still the king of your outer look-at-me abs, planks will tone those deep, underlying muscles that help you power through any workout.