Now when you say shrink your stomach, am I right to assume you mean lose your belly fat and not the surgical procedure of actually shrinking your stomach?. If so this is very easy to answer, but I know you will have read around the internet and heard conflicting advice.
Take it from me, I used to have a chubby belly, but now hold a 6 pack every single day. Not no bulking and cutting, a nice lean body year round, with muscle added each month. Remember you cannot directly burn fat from your stomach, but by burning fat overall you can shrink your stomach.
Create a Calorie Deficit To Shrink Your Stomach Through Diet
This is one that we all agree on. The difference is in how to create this calorie deficit. Diet is the most important thing to shrink your stomach. Abs are definitely made in the kitchen.
6 Meals A Day?
Most websites will tell you to eat 6 meals a day because this speeds up your metabolism, but this is not accurate and they don’t even have evidence to back this up. Their argument is that there is a thermogenic effect (calories needed to digest the food) on food which is true. It is said that the thermic effect accounts for about 10% of the calories you just ate. So if you ate 400 calories worth of food, it would take 40 calories to digest this.
Lets do some simple maths for you to ram this point home. Say your total calorie allowance for the day is 2000 calories. That means it takes 200 calories for digestion. Splitting this up into 6 small meals does nothing to increase it, but what it does is play on the fact that you can’t cook 6 meals a day with a busy lifestyle, so in steps ready meals and who do you think sells these to you? Your metabolism wont slow down from eating 1- 3 meals a day, so just eat when you feel hungry and make it a good meal to shrink your stomach.
Cut Back On Processed Foods
Another thing a lot of websites suggest is that a calore is a calorie. But weight loss is more than just calories eaten should be less than calories expended. Simplest explanation I can give you is that of the storage hormone insulin. Certain types of calories spike insulin more, these being sugars and carbohydrates. Other macronutrients trigger insulin as well, but not by as much as carbohydrates. So if you get all your calories from carbs, these are more likely to be stored as fat. Remember guys I said cut back not eliminate. It is well known that restrictive diets fail in the long run as people get cravings and pig out.
Intermittent Fasting
This can be done in a few ways. You can perform the leangains approach, which is daily 16 hour fasts with a 8 hour feeding window with the makority of calories coming after training .Or you could you use the Eat Stop Eat approach which is 24 hour fasts once or twice a week to create a big calorie deficit. I personally use a mix of both, depending on the season. But when getting ripped I combine both for great effects.
Creating A Calorie Deficit Through Training To Shrink Your Stomach
Training is the next way to create a calorie defecit. But again, you have probably been bombarded with wrong information. You have probably heard that to shrink your stomach you need to do 1000 crunches and lots of cardio. Trust me that is the worse advice to shrink your stomach. Avoid it. Here is a fool proof plan to shrink your stomach through training.
Direct Ab Workouts
Now this is the biggest load of rubbish of them all. The do lots of crunches to shrink your stomach. Let me tell you a little something about training. If you do lots of reps to failure, your muscles will grow back bigger to anticipate you doing this again. So if you keep on doing many crunches, what do you think the result is going to be? You are going to make your fat belly even bigger by building your ab muscles under your layer of fat.
When it comes to performing ab exercises when you already have a fat belly, you want to avoid training to failure. Instead you want to strengthen your abs and core, as this will help in life. The best exercises for this are hanging leg raises, you can see how to progress to this level using Convict Conditioning. Other good exercises are isometric ones, which build strength and density and not mass. When you shrink your stomach successfully using my tips, you will reveal a truly sexy set of abs whatever your gender.
The following isometric exercises work great. The plank and the side plank and also renegade rows. You can see me performing the plank and side plank in the first two videos and my mate Yavor performing renegade rows in the last one.
Plank
Side Plank
Renegade Rows
If you want a pure abs workout book, you should look at the classic ==>Truth About Abs by Mike Greary<==
Resistance Training
The best program for this, is hands down Visual Impact Muscle Building. It is a complete resource for building muscle and burning fat and a book I constantly read. When you reduce calories or perform intermittent fasting, it is important you do resistance training. This can take form as weights, bodyweight or even resistance bands. This is to let your muscles know not to go through atrophy while on a lower calorie diet. Aim to do resistance training 3-5 times a week but even twice is fine if you are pushed for time.
Cardiovascular Training
Remember guys, cardio is just a tool to increase your calorie deficit. Focus on perfecting your diet to shrink your stomach. Again when it comes to cardio, people get it all wrong again. They do hours each week of steady state cardio, when this is the slowest and most inefficient way. The best cardio to perform are metabolic circuit training, a HIIT workout and hybrid cardio which is HIIT training followed by 20-30 minutes of steady state cardio.
These are the best tips to shrink your stomach, but think outside the box, you can even pick up a sport to increase your calorie deficit. The biggest tip that a lot of sites miss out on is what you do outside of structured exercising. Are you sedentary for the rest of the day, or are you active? I wrote a whole post on Non Exercise Activity Thermogenesis (NEAT for short). This is one of the most important yet underrated variables on how to shrink your stomach.
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