Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth - 2787: The Best Way to Get a Flat Stomach

Episode Date: February 5, 2026

The Best Way to Get a Flat Stomach 5 Steps to Get a Flat Stomach. (1:53) 1. Diet. (2:07) 2. Build the muscles of the midsection. (6:40) 3. Practice TVA exercises. (9:46) 4. Avoid foods that bloat. (12:25) 5. Manage cortisol. (17:00) Related Links/Products Mentioned Flat Tummy Guide: www.mindpumpmedia.com/flat-tummy-guide  Visit Hiya for an exclusive offer for Mind Pump listeners! ** Receive 50% off your first order ** February Promotion: Feb 1 - Feb 14th - The Couple's Bundle (Aesthetic, HIIT, Muscle Mommy, No BS 6-Pack Abs), $498 value, only $197!  Visit: https://www.mpvalentine.com  Mind Pump Store Mind Pump #2437: What Happens to Your Body When You Quit Ultra-Processed Foods for 30 Days Mind Pump #2756 : The 10 Best Breakfast Foods for Lean Muscle Gains Mind Pump #2085: Abs & Core Masterclass The TVA and Your Hip Flexors: Smaller Waist and More Core Definition – Mind Pump Blog Stomach Vacuums for a Smaller Waist - YouTube Mind Pump Podcast – YouTube Mind Pump Free Resources  

If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. Mind Pump, Mind Pump with your hosts. Sal DeStefano, Adam Schaefer, and Justin Andrews. You just found the most downloaded fitness, health, and entertainment podcast. This is Mind Pump. Today's episode, we talk about the best way to get a flat stomach. By the way, we have a free guide, the flat tummy guide. You can get it right now, cost nothing.

And it really instructs you, teaches you how to get a flat tummy. go to mindpumpmedia.com forward slash flat dash tummy dash guide. Now this episode is brought to you by a sponsor, Haya Health. So this is a multivitamin for children. Now here's the issue with multivitamins for kids. They're usually just candy. They're gummy candies. More sugar than anything.

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A lot of people do it. wrong. They don't have the right priorities. We're going to break it down. We're going to give you the steps so you can get a flat tummy. Let's go. Slat in that tummy. Step one is we have to eat in a way that gets us to a body fat percentage that makes it even remotely close to see it. You have to be able to reveal it. Right? Because this doesn't work if you are 75 pounds overweight. No. This is number one. So these are listed in order. Okay. And number one is you got to eat in a way to leaner. Like you have to get it, you can't get around that. And look, trying to out exercise a really bad diet is futile. Futile. It's really hard to burn calories, you guys.

Like 500 calories. Okay. I know what the, the cardio machine say, but they lie. The average person would have to do, like half, right. Yeah. The average person might have to do like an hour or more of cardio, intensive cardio to burn about 500 calories. I could eat five, I could, I could drink five calories in two seconds. Yeah. I could eat three bites of something could be 500 calories. It's a losing game. It is.

And so you have to look at your diet in order to make this happen. And there's really, it boils down to this. You have to be in a calorie deficit, meaning you have to take in less calories in your burning. So what we're going to do is we're going to help you do this without having to necessarily count your calories and get all crazy with it. Because you could do that. But there are a few steps you could take with diet that tends to make

this happen naturally. So number one with your diet, avoid heavily processed foods. They just make you overeat. So trying to eat in a deficit while also eating a lot of processed foods. So are. Very, very difficult. You're going to have a lot of cravings. You're always going to feel like you're starving. It's always going to feel like you're not eating enough. It is. And those foods are engineered to do that. They're designed to make you overeat and studies that really good studies will show this is to the tune of like 600 extra calories a day with the same level of satiety. Meaning you feel just as full as you would with whole natural foods, except you ate 600 more calories. So avoid those.

And if you're already eating a lot of those types of foods, naturally calories start to drop. And then the second thing that you would do is eat your target body weight and grams of protein and eat it first. Those two things right there. For most people, I'd say probably eight. Especially breakfast. That's it. But for about 85% of people, if you hit your target body weight and grams of protein, ate that first in the meal, avoided heavily processed food. you're going to be a calorie deficit just doing those two things.

Yeah, I want to echo what Justin just said because I think I'm helping somebody right now with their diet, just a friend of mine, like giving them little tips here and there. And I told him this ahead of time. And of course, the thing that is so challenging is breakfast. It is. Almost every breakfast food that is marketed to us is a carb heavy food. And even something, a staple like eggs, and you bring this up all the time. It's like, you know, you're still only looking.

at five, six grams of protein, right? One egg is six grams of protein? Yeah, so it takes a lot of eggs. So two eggs is 12. Yeah. That's not much. Yeah. And we're not getting there.

Yeah, most people are not eating beyond four eggs, okay? A four egg serving for a lot of people or a four egg omelet is huge. So breakfast is a key. And first, just want to give everybody listening the permission that you can have dinner for breakfast. Mm-hmm. I know. Yeah, it doesn't have to be a breakfast.

And for hundreds of years, we did that. Yeah. We had dinner for breakfast. Yeah. Breakfast is a made-up word that we've been marketed to. You can absolutely have some ground beef and rice for breakfast. And if you want it to feel more breakfast-y, crack two eggs over it. You know what I'm saying?

That's what I do to make it feel breakfast-y is I put two eggs over the top of it. But that is crucial because if you get behind on protein early and you also and or have a high carbohydrate type of breakfast to start your day, really difficult to, one, manage the calories and two, hit the protein intake. That's right. And so win the morning by having a high 40 to 50 gram type of protein meal is a good strategy for both men and women. And this part will really help you out in this process. My daughter was so mad when she discovered that one egg was six grams of protein. She was so mad.

And she was like, what? That's it? It was like this big moment. I'm like, yeah, honey, you'd have to eat like four of these. Because we're marketed to that that is. Because eggs are considered a superfood and a high protein food. It's a high protein as a percentage of its weight and all that stuff. It's true.

But it's an egg. It's small. You're not getting a lot of protein. No, no. Next up is to build the muscles of your midsection. Now notice I said build. A lot of people like to train the muscles of the midsection. But whenever somebody trains their abs or their obliques,

They think for some reason that they do a million reps. Yes, endurance. It's like, yeah, oh, tons of reps because that makes everything sculpted and shape. No, no, the muscles of your midsection are like the muscles of your upper body and lower body. If you want them to be more visible, if you want to look more sculpted in your midsection, you got to build them. How do you build them? Same way you build your biceps. Use sufficient resistance.

So doing 60 reps of, you know, tons of crunches is not going to do it. Just like 60 reps of a, you know, super light dumbbell is not going to give you the biceps. that you want. You got to do sufficient resistance. So 10 wraps, 15 wraps, even as low as eight reps with good resistance, full range of motion, good hard squeeze. You'll get abs and obliques that start to develop. And then it'll give you that sculpted midsection that you're looking for. Yeah, it's so ironic. I don't know where that thought came from. It's a muscle at the end of the day. Like, why would it, why would training it be any different? And it's either a lot, a lot of reps or it's also just isometric focus. And that's it. And so.

So, you know, and you could get strong. But, like, if you're going for actual visible definition, like, we need to actually build them up. Well, complete honesty, I'm guilty even as a trainer of teaching this. And I don't know if it just came out of habit of, in the culture at that time. Every ab routine you'd ever seen was bicycle abs and supersets and circuits. So, like conditioning. Yeah, a lot of ab conditioning type of movements. and, you know, crazy to think that I even had the experience and the knowledge and strength training and still, you know, you know what I fell for, and I remember the same thing this was with calves, because this was later for me, too, with calves, was, oh, the muscle fiber difference in your calves and abs, needs more, more volume, more reps to get that.

And I remember thinking that as a trainer that my calves and my abs. And more slow twitch muscle. Yes. And so they needed all these high reps. And it was like, and the two biggest things I ever did for my calves and my abs was figure out, oh, I can do five by five. Yeah. Exercises for calves and five by five for abs. And holy shit, my abs built.

It was such an aha moment. It was late in my career. This is 10 years after being a personal trainer. Did I finally unlock that? And it was like this complete epiphany I had. I would get lean and I always admired people who. who were lean but had six packs without flexing. And I'd get down as low as like 9% body fat.

And you couldn't see my abs unless I really flex them. I couldn't figure out what it was. When I started doing high tension, treating them like I was building them, oh, it was like overnight to the point where now my abs are a standout body part. Now my abs, they show, I could be a 12% body fat and I'll look like I have abs because they've built them. And that's what happens when a muscle is built. It looks more sculpted because what you see is the muscle.

Yeah, yeah. Next up is to practice exercises that train the transverse abdominis, the TVA muscles. These are the muscles that draw in the midsection. So you have your abs. And what your abs do is they bring your lower, your rib cage closer to your pelvis, right? So that's that sit-up motion, that crunch motion. Then you have obliques that rotate your body. They rotate your trunk.

And they also do some kind of side bending a little bit. And there's other muscles underneath that do that. But then you have a muscle. A lot of people don't know this. There's an actual muscle, which job of this muscle is to draw in. And so right now, if you're listening to this or watching this, when you try to suck in your stomach, you're using your TVA. So you can see the ribs.

Yeah. And if you strengthen this muscle, you'll actually shrink your waist a little bit. I've had, and this is especially true for women postpartum. I've had women postpartum come to me who got fit and all that stuff, couldn't figure out why they still, their midsection to look the same. We practice TVA exercises like vacuums, you know, hands and knees. Oh, yeah. And they shrink their waist by like a half an inch.

necessary for it to get super elastic. That's right. They have to make room. This is such a cool unlock, too, for a couple of things. One, I've seen this with people who can get visible top abs, but then they have kind of a little pooch that kind of hangs out. And so when they start to activate that TV, it kind of pulls everything in. And then now they can see that. The other thing that's so massive is this is such an important support muscle for the entire body.

Oh, that's why it's there. I mean, this is a weight belt of the body. I mean, I know we're talking about visibly seeing your abs and the aesthetic piece here. but this is such a healthy muscle to develop. In fact, I think back to when I was 20, it was the first thing I got excited about. I always tell a story when I'm coaching and developing trainers that like overthink,

like, oh, but I'm so new. And I know, I'm like, I knew nothing, like nothing. I remember when I was mind-blown by the TVA. Like, I didn't know what the transfer star was. It was, that was all I knew. It was like, I didn't know anything else. Like, I literally learned that. But it was so excited because I learned how valuable it was for posture

and before we engage in any movement, that locks us in first and just how important this was. And I just taught everybody that. That was all I knew to teach. And it was valuable to everybody. And I built my first little bit of training client portfolio off of teaching people all about that muscle. And so I think our muscles collective that not only is this important for the visible side, but this is so good just for overall health. And so there's a double win to train this.

And I have. I've seen clients that could get lean enough to where they could see like the top four pack, but then they just kind of have this little pooch. I don't understand. I can see my top, but I can't see my bottom. And them training,

getting a strong transversid dominus, would pull that in and doing things like vacuums and what's sort of the four point draw and maneuver. I love to do this. I was just yesterday. It was walking on the treadmill for an hour. And I'll practice the drawn movement where I'm walking.

And so, and I can feel, when you do it, you can feel your posture activate. You stand up tall. It's just so good for you to do this. And we should all practice this more, not just for the aesthetics, but you get that benefit.

So if you're listening, easy way to do this, hands and knees, and you draw your belly button into your spine as far as you can and hold it and hold it. And then relax, allow the belly to hang, rest in that position for a little bit, and then repeat it. So you're literally just sucking in and squeezing.

And the reason why you're on your hands and knees is it gives you a little bit of resistance. Your organs are pushing. pushing down so you have that resistance. Gravitation. Do we have good, do we have MPTV videos on this? We do. Yeah, I'm sure we do.

So you can definitely find this on our YouTube channel, MPTV. We have a lot of cool stuff like this. That's right. Next up, avoid foods that make you bloated. You know, I can't, I've had numerous clients where they, they would talk about flattening their stomach. Yeah. And then this is how I'd find out. They'd say, God, my stomach, I just can't get it flat.

And then through questioning, I would find out that at the, in the morning. morning when I wake up, I have a really flat stomach. But at night, I suddenly have this big belly. So what's going on here? I'm like, that's not body fat. That's not a muscle issue. You are bloated. That's a digestive issue. And so A, you could always get tested for things like CBO and whatnot. But a lot of times it was just foods that cause bloat. And the common offenders were like gluten, dairy, sometimes eggs, sometimes lack of fiber.

Yeah. Like gluten was a big one. I can't tell you how many times I would cut gluten out to people like this. And then suddenly they're like, whoa. Yeah. I'm not getting the big belly at night like I used to. This is a huge one. Uh, this,

a lot of times we think because we eat something in our diet on a regular basis and we don't have any other crazy adverse, but we're just, you're constantly, like, if this, if you, this, if you, this resonates. Yeah, exactly. Cause you're like, hey, cut this out. Like, I eat that all the time. Yeah, I eat it all the time. I'm fine.

I don't have my stool is normal. I don't like some of that. But I constantly feel puffy or I constantly feel bloated. It's like, yeah, you're eating something that you can eat, but you obviously have some sort of an intolerance to it. We were talking earlier on a podcast, and I was just talking about like, I recognize this with dairy with me. I can have dairy, but I have a certain. There's a threshold. And then I could push beyond that threshold.

And then I have adverse effects. And then I, you know, throw my stool off or I'll get bloat from it. Same thing with gluten. I can have a little bit of gluten. But if I have a lot of gluten in a day, I'll retain and hold a bunch of water. A lot of people just are so detached from their body and their food and that they... Because they're so used to it. Yeah.

And this is one of the things why I love to teach like a day or too fast is you take someone who's one day off or two days off of eating and all of a sudden they feel like they lost all kinds of bodies. You didn't lose pounds of body fats. No, he's not inflamed. You're just not inflamed. We literally calm the digestive system down for a little bit. Now why don't we pay attention as we reintroduce foods to when you start to feel that blow?

And that's the interesting part, too, is when you reintroduce healthy foods that are, like, common, like, I'm seeking these foods out, but don't realize that's actually irritating me because my biochemistry is different. Yeah, you're right, because whole grain, you know, whole grain oats or whole grain bread. This is healthy. Yeah, it's bothering. Yeah. Cut it out. And pay attention to that. 100%. The other thing is regular. Um, if you're not having a regular bowel movement every single day, then you, you might need to change something. Here's an easy fix. I don't think this is ideal, perfect. it's better to get this from food. But I've done this with clients. I've done this with myself, especially when I go really high protein. Use cillium husk.

Cillium husk is a fiber. It's got some health benefits. It's very inexpensive. Taking cillium husk once or twice a day, for some people take it with each meal. And suddenly you're regular. And you'll notice the bloat go away. Get rid of all the microplastics too.

There's a theory, right? Is that true? Yeah, there's a theory that because it's a bulking fiber that it'll bind to the microplastics, too. to the microplastics in your gut. So when you eat and it helps get rid of them. Yeah, I know. It's another accident.

Yeah, I hope that's true. So I've been. Because I don't, I don't really use that. I have once or a few times. I haven't really noticed it. I use it every day. You guys see me. Yeah.

Yeah. Oh, interesting. Like Doug's using something right now. A reminder for him. And then lastly, manage your cortisol, but to put it more, just more clear, manage your stress. Now, I said cortisol because here's what happens.

When you're in this kind of chronic stress state, which can come from a lot of different things. It can come from lack of sleep, poor diet. It can be normal stressors like kids, work, whatever. It could also be lack of purpose sometimes or lack of meaning. Sometimes your job is stressful because you don't see the meaning behind it or your family life is stressful because you just haven't reframed the season of your life. And there's data on this, right, where their life doesn't change,

but they change how they view it and suddenly the stress drops dramatically. So this is more complex. But when it comes to cortisol, high, consistent high cortisol levels change how you store body fat. And it is associated with higher levels of visceral body fat, especially in the midsection, and higher amounts of body fat

around the midsection in general, in particular for women. In particular for women where you'll see women typically don't store around the belly like men do, but when their cortisol is chronically high and they gain body fat, suddenly they're like, this is weird. I typically don't store my belly.

Now I am. I can't tell you how many clients, especially my female clients, uh, were trying to lose the last two or three percent body fat. So they thought these last two were the big offenders right here. The foods that bloat and the managing stress. Yes.

Where they were like they were in good shape, but they always felt like they would just felt bloated or they couldn't get that last bit of leanness that they were trying to obtain. And literally stress and some foods that they were eating was just causing They were constantly mildly inflamed and holding onto water. And so, which gave them this look as if they were carrying a little bit higher body fat. And they really weren't. They were in great shape.

And I can always tell because their arms and shoulders that everything else would look more defined. And I knew they were in good shape and they had a good, everything else was good. But like just they're managing their stress level, finding the one or two foods that might have been offender. And all of a sudden, stomach flattens out completely like that. And so a lot of times, especially if you're a listener and you would consider yourself a fitness person, but you struggle with that last couple percent and you think you eat really good, it's sometimes it's a simple one or two things in the diet that you're eating that you would consider a health food, that your body just doesn't agree with you very much and or you've got a lot of stress going on in your life.

And then you're also pushing it hard in the gym so that you're just inflamed a lot and then your body retains water. I had a trainer that worked for me who was always, trying to, she was always struggling to get that last few percent down. Same thing, fit, healthy, ate right, broke up with her boyfriend and suddenly got leaner. She just had a toxic relationship and they broke up and she suddenly got more fit. And it was like, duh. I remember reading somewhere that the body when it, when it's inflamed like that, either due to stress, over training, all the things or even digestive stuff can hold water, well, can hold water for up to 72 hours from, from whatever, you know, so I always, whenever I'd have a client,

that would tell me that they look like that. And I knew I was controlling their diet. It would be like, hold on, let's, let's see what the next three days looks like, and let's eat these things and see. And a lot of times I would see that come right out in like two or three days. So, and I noticed this with myself during competing and measuring and watching all the water stuff. Like, there would be times where I'd eat foods that aligned with my macros. And so I was good on the diet.

But I ate a food that I was a little bit, it had a little bit of a tolerance to. And then I'd be like, oh, my God, I looked like I'd gain all this weight. And the scale went up. and then about three days later, I'd stay, avoid that thing. And then all of a sudden, water would get rid of them. Oh, I mean, for me, just going back, if I eat gluten two days in a row, three days in row, I will, I look like I go up 3% body fat just from water retention. Yeah.

Yeah. Look, we have a free flat tummy guide that breaks down what you can do to get the midsection you want. It's free. I wrote it. Go to mindpumpmedia.com forward slash flat dash tummy dash guide and download it now. Also, you can find us on Instagram. We'll see what's at Mind Pump Media.

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