 All right, our first question is from Britt Etheridge. What exercises should you include if your routine is to get a flat, tight? I keep screwing these things up. We're keeping that. What exercises should you include in your routine to get a flat, tight stomach? All right, flat, tight midsection. It's one of the most common goals that people have when they work out. Number one, you gotta get lean. This is the big one. I've worked with lots of clients who, that's their goal, and, but their body fat percentage is too high. And regardless of how you train the muscles underneath your body fat, it's not gonna work if you have too much body fat on your midsection, especially men. Men tend to store body fat in the midsection, and so they'll work out their core and do all the right exercises, and which is great, you get stronger, better stability, but you still have the belly. So number one, you gotta get lean. Number two, strengthening all the muscles in the midsection are going to make your midsection feel tighter. Anytime you strengthen a muscle, it feels tighter. It feels stronger. You know what I'm talking about. Like you poke somebody who doesn't lift weights in their arm and it feels a little flabby. Touch somebody's arm who works out, and you automatically feel that there's muscle there. Muscle's a dense tissue. So there's no wrong exercises here. As long as you're doing them right, anything from crunches to planks to reverse crunches and exercises for the obliques, they're all gonna be really, really good. Now there are exercises that target specifically the muscles that draw in the midsection. Yeah, the TVA, right? And this one's a big one for, especially for women after they have babies for the first time. Years ago, this was a long time ago, I had a trainer that worked for me, very fit, a young lady, and then she got pregnant. It was her first baby. Then she had the baby, and she got lean pretty quickly because she was really into resistance training, great metabolism, but she would complain. She's like, man, it's so crazy, I'm lean now, but I have this like pooch in my lower ab area. Even though she was lean, she's like it's not as flat as it used to be. And we had another trainer on board, this was a long time ago. So back in those days, I think we didn't really understand training the TVA as much as we do now, but we did have a trainer on staff that was really educated, and she goes, oh, are you doing any exercises to strengthen the transverse abdominis? This is a muscle that surrounds the midsection. If you wanna flex it right now while you're listening to this podcast, just draw on your stomach. Yeah, it's like when you're at the beach and you wanna suck in your stomach, that's what that muscle does. But when you're pregnant, that muscle has to stretch and atrophy to allow room for the baby to grow. So when you're done, you have the baby, you work at your abs, you work at your obliques, but if you don't target the TVA, it may not ever get as tight as it was before. It holds in your organs, essentially. So like the drawn-in maneuver cat cow or the vacuum pose, things like that would be great. Even in our prime program, where you're up against the wall and you're doing that check where we're trying to then get all points of contact to touch the wall, a lot of times you're gonna notice right away with where your discrepancies lie and how to then draw in a little more effectively and get rid of the rib flare and everything else by getting access to the TVA. And the other thing is be patient. The stomach area for most of us is one of the last places for it to come off. I think we're always looking for the quick answer or the quick exercise that's gonna make my stomach look a certain way. And the truth is that both men and women store body fat in the stomach area, and it takes a long time to get a six pack. I mean, you gave that stat, Sal, that was mind-blowing not that long ago that there's more millionaires than there are six packs in the world. So it's not easy, okay? It's pretty fucking hard to make a million dollars. It's even harder to get a six pack. So, and a lot of the reason why it's hard, it's not because it's so difficult that most people can't do it. It's just the consistency it takes to get to that. Just like the consistency it probably takes to become a millionaire is working towards that. It's not something that you do overnight. You just gotta keep plugging away at it and you'll see incremental change. And I think where you gotta be careful where I think I have to constantly coach to when I'm speaking to somebody that's chasing this goal is the day-to-day fluctuations. And this is normally what gives people the, they get discouraged or they give up or they make crazy dramatic changes when they didn't need to. And really easily, and we've all felt this, right? We've all woke up in the morning and been like, oh wow, my stomach looks so much flatter than what it looked like yesterday in the middle of the day or whatever. When you eat carbohydrates, you drink water, you eat something that could be potentially inflammatory, all these things could cause like this, this blow in your stomach and make you feel like you're quote unquote, fatter. When you're not necessarily fatter, it's just your body reacting to those things that I just said. And so it gives that illusion. And then you either one, you give up and think you're failing at your attempt to get a flatter stomach or two, you do something extreme to try and fix it. You can't let that get in your head. You just gotta stay consistent with the process of dieting and staying consistent for a long period of time. And it'll eventually get there. Yeah, that was the point I was gonna bring up too. It's a lot of times like that internal inflammation from being intolerant to certain types of foods hasn't been addressed. And so you're gonna carry that with you and it's gonna be pushing on your stomach. Meanwhile, you're trying to gain that flat stomach by doing all these exercises, by really trying to target the area and everything, but it's like you're spinning your wheels. I actually measured it. I've actually measured it in some clients. I've worked with clients that I would also have them work with somebody who's a food intolerant specialist or somebody who works with the gut. And we've actually measured it where we would take a waist measurement. They didn't get leaner. They didn't lose any weight, but they would lose an inch or two inches off their waist because they were able to change their diet to where they were eating foods that were easier for them to digest or they solved a bacterial overgrowth issue like SIBO or whatever. And it's like, oh my gosh, all of a sudden my stomach is flat and I couldn't get anywhere near this point with exercise and workouts and stuff because I had to do with bloat and with inflammation. Now back to the TVA, the other thing you can do is activate the TVA muscle while you do your other core exercises. So when you're doing like a crunch, instinctually you'll push your abs out a little bit because the abs will pull and they'll try to shorten the distance between your pelvis and your rib cage. And what you'll notice when you do your crunch is your abs come up a little bit. You'll see them kind of come up a little higher. Try sucking them down while you do your crunch. And what you're basically doing is you're activating the TVA while you're doing your ab or core exercises. So you get the dual benefit of working your core but also activating and strengthening the muscles that keep the waist tight and small. And also an excessive lower back arch and like really addressing postural issues too will help to give you that like flatter stomach look just by addressing your hips and like where their position is. And the cue for both what you just both ended on right now is, and I love to teach this. I believe we have a YouTube video where we get into this. You know, if you're laying on the ground you're getting ready to do a crunch before you just sit up and do a crunch actually think to press the low back flat first. That will create that draw in that Sal's talking about activate the TVA and then do the crunch. So you're in a crunch position you're about ready to do your crunch or full sit up before you do it, press the low back flat down you'll feel your core activate to hold it hold it flat and down, keep that tense and then sit up this will make a big difference.