 Our first question is from Fit Allen. How do I get rid of that bottom belly pooch because it is really annoying? This was a common complaint or request I would get from clients back in the day. Very common. Especially women. Pooch. Yeah, and I'm gonna assume this is a woman just from the verbiage. Yeah, I don't know many dudes that say my pooch. Yeah, bottom belly pooch. So, okay, a couple of things. One, if it's body fat that you're referring to, you gotta get leaner. If you're talking about having excess body fat in the lower abdominal region, you just gotta get leaner. And if that's a place you tend to store, body fat, it's gonna take longer. Last place to go. To get rid of it, which means you just gotta keep getting leaner. So, it may be a stubborn area for you because you're predisposed to store there. Now, there are some studies that suggest, and this is far from conclusive, but some studies suggest that if you're a high stress individual for women in particular, you're more likely to store body fat in the midsection. So hormones and stress can kind of change a little bit according to some of these studies on how you store body fat. Again, they're not conclusive. My opinion is that's probably, unless it's extreme, that's probably a minor effect. I think it's largely determined by genetics. Now, if it's not body fat that can be frustrating. If you're lean, I've had clients like this where they're lean and they don't have a lot of body fat in their stomach, but the lower abdominal region kind of sticks out a little bit. Yeah, and so here's what you need to consider. First and foremost, we're standing. Gravity's pushing things down. There are organs in your abdominal cavity, and they're going to push out the lower abs or lower abdominal area more than the upper just because of gravity. So that's number one. Number two, there are muscles in your core that actually are responsible for keeping things tight. And one in particular is the TVA, the transverse abdominis. If you train just your abs and your obliques and you train your core all the time, but you don't do specific TVA exercises, especially after having a child, because when you have a child, the TVA stretches and atrophies, it has to. It's making room for the baby. It can't keep everything in tight. After you have the baby, that muscle will remain disconnected and not strong and you could leave you with where your internal organs push out a little more than they did before because you didn't strengthen those muscles. We actually did a video, so we'll make sure it's in the show notes. Did we do a video on this? We did a stomach vacuum video. That's actually one of our more popular videos. That's right. Where I demonstrate an exercise that targets the TVA. It's not going to be effective forever, but if your pooch is due to a weak TVA, especially after having a kid, it's an excellent exercise to practice. And I would say do that five minutes every day or every other day and you should notice some. Oh, I would say that's one and two. One is just absolutely dieting to where you can lose the body fat. And I can definitely, I can totally understand where this person is coming from because when I competed, the first show that I got ready for, I remember being down four or 5% body fat and I still had this, I mean, I was lean, shredded everywhere, but then I had this little tiny pooch that was left over still there. And it was really weird to me that that had happened. And it took three cycles of me leaning out as lean as I could possibly get, getting down to that single digit body fat, going back to training, adding calories, building more muscle, then cutting again. And it took three full cycles like that of shredding as lean as I've ever been in my life to building, going back to building for a few months to shredding to as lean as I possibly could and then the third time was when it finally was eliminated. So it could be a very stubborn area. And you could, and if it's like the first time you got all the way down to the lowest body fat percentage, especially if you were carrying that body fat there for most of your life for a very long time and you're now the leanest you've ever been, but yet it's still there. My advice is to then reverse diet and go the other direction to, focus on building muscle and adding calories back into the diet for a while and then come right back down. And don't let yourself, and the goal in this case is, and I think this is where it's probably hard for a lot of people is the consistency factor, right? So if you go back and you fall off the wagon again, you're just gonna end up adding it to that stubborn place again and you're just in the same, you're on a hamster wheel just doing the same thing over. So you've gotta get to the point where you lean down as much as you've ever been, then reverse out so you're adding calories back in but you're doing it methodically and you're trying to build muscle and use that to your advantage to help speed your metabolism up and then come back down again to shred that off. I had to get down to, I don't know what I got down to. What would you say my body fat was in my pictures, my MAPS anabolic photos? Oh, you're between three and five. Yeah, so I got really shredded and it took me to get that lean for that totally to go away. And I remember when it first happened, I was laying down in bed and it was hot summer, so I had my shirt off and I looked down and I see that there's no more of that extra body fat on my belly button. I had to get super shredded to get there. Now, here's- I had a dream about that. I'm looking, that you were shredded or that I was shredded. So that you can see your winky. No, what you just described. That was, yeah, anyways. Yeah, no. That was a joke that went wrong. We should let Justin just- Oh, you're fat? Oh, yeah. Thanks for turning that around. I appreciate that, I was trying to say I was like fantasizing about that and then you ruined it. Yeah, no, I remember looking down and seeing that it was finally gone. But here's the thing to take away from that. It's not necessarily to get super shredded because I did get super shredded. It was an unhealthy lean. I honestly, because I was doing photos and I knew that I had to look a certain way to get any attention to sell maps and Ebola. This was, of course, before mine pump. I got myself to an unhealthy body fat percentage and in real life, had you met me, I wouldn't have looked impressive. I actually looked a little, I looked gaunt. I mean, if I took my shirt off and you looked at my abs, you'd be like, wow, but I wasn't healthy. So if you get lean and if you're a woman and you're like down to like 15% body fat and you're like, I still got this lower ab push, you're fine, you're okay. Like getting any leaner, yeah, you might get rid of it, but you're gonna be compromising your health and your metabolism. And it's funny because when I came out of that, that shredded state, I remember, I came out of it, I did everything wrong. I binged or whatever. I got sick for like, two or three days, gained body fat. My metabolism was much slower. I remember I was like, wow, I'm gaining body fat on way less calories than before. And it took me a little while to get myself back to normal. But here's the other side, of course, is the exercise. Now I talked about the vacuum exercise, great exercise. Here's the other thing you can do. When you work your abs, you can also change your exercises so that you do focus on activating the TVA. And this is how you do it. Let's say you're doing a crunch. Rather than doing your crunch slowly coming up and squeezing the abs, which is still fine, that's great form, as you're coming up simultaneously, suck your belly button down to your spine. So while you're coming up and squeezing, also suck in your stomach like you're trying to get your belly button all the way down to your spine. And what you'll find is, A, you're not gonna be able to do nearly as many reps. Very, very difficult. And B, you're gonna be activating your TVA so it's gonna feel very different. And what that does is it simultaneously works the abs but also starts to teach the TVA how to activate. But if you're post-pregnancy, just doing a standing vacuum is gonna be hard because you've completely lost connection to that muscle. Yeah, a lot of my clients, I think that was a very common thing of just posture, where it looked like their stomach was a bit more distended than normally if they had proper bracing techniques and they were applying that and connected to the TVA. Like it really does make a big difference in terms of like even just sitting down and standing up like what you present.