How to maintain a six-pack without hard work

The key points are:

• There are two main pitfalls that prevent people from maintaining a six-pack physique: a gap in their diet (not getting enough protein), and being too small (not having enough muscle mass). [01:01]
• Solving the protein deficiency first by aiming for 1.8g of protein per kg of lean body weight, which can be accomplished in a single high-protein meal per day. [03:44]
• Once the diet is dialled in, get lean enough to the lower end of your healthy weight range, but don’t attempt to get overly lean, as that can trigger the body to rebound and regain weight. [05:13]
• The final step is to focus on building muscle through strength training and eating to appetite, which will allow you to get leaner over time without constant dieting or cutting.
• Aim for a cycle of 3-9 months of muscle building followed by 1-3 months of cutting to get progressively leaner while staying within a healthy weight range. [09:38]

If you’re working hard for your six pack, you’re not keeping it. Hear me out here. Let’s say you cut down to a point where you can see your abs, you hit a calorie deficit, you lose weight. You do that for long enough that you eventually get lean enough that your abs are visible. But if you’re like a lot of people, me in the past, you find yourself stuck. You’re putting in all this effort to get to this point. You’re exercising hard, restricting calories, denying your body’s hunger signals. You finally get to the point where you lean, you got a six pack. What do you do now? Do you keep living in this state of constant hunger and denial, hating yourself, being focused on training and nutrition and unable to actually enjoy the results of all this effort? Or do you just give up and go back to being unhappy with the state of your body for the rest of your life?
There is a third option, and I want to share it with you now so that you can get your six pack, but more importantly, maintain that for the rest of your life without it being a constant battle, without being a gym junkie, without living out of a topware container, without giving up beer and pizza. And if this all sounds too good to be true, then this is a video that you need to watch. There are two main pitfalls that stop most people ever being able to maintain a six pack if they ever do manage to get there. And the good thing is that these are the same problems that if you solve will also allow you to get lean really easily in the first place with a lot less pain and sacrifice than you might’ve otherwise put in. And those are firstly a gap in your diet and being too small.
So let’s solve these one at a time, starting with the easy one and then I’ll show you how to solve the second. Now, this one trips a lot of people up and it’s what held me back a lot in the past too, because if you’re too small, you don’t have enough muscle, but your goal is to be leaner, then what do you do? Bear with me, we’ll get to it, I’ll show you. But first, the low hanging fruit. If there’s a major gap in your diet, then there is no point worrying about anything else about calorie deficits, about muscle mass because we’ll be fighting an uphill battle like trying to fill a leaky bucket. If we get this right and it’s really simple, everything else becomes much easier and there’s a lot of effort that you don’t even have to put in. There’s is really interesting research with lab rats that looked at protein or meat and starch or carb consumption.
And the basic idea was that if you’re lacking in either of those basic components, carbohydrates or protein, then hunger would be elevated regardless of actual caloric intake. And so based on the mix, when they had the perfect balance of both these nutrients, the overall calorie consumption was lowest. And so what this shows us is that if we’re deficient in essential nutrients, most people don’t have a problem with carbohydrates, but protein, if we don’t get enough of it regardless of our overall energy intake, we’re going to have an elevated level of hunger. Because if we’re not eating enough of an essential nutrient like protein, which our body was required to build muscle tissue amongst a lot of other processes, there’s only one way that our body can tell us to eat more, and that’s through hunger signalling. On a very crude level, our body is like a car with one indicator.
If we’re low on fuel, the light goes on. If we’re low on oil, the light goes on. If we’re low on water, light goes on. So if we’re not hitting enough protein, that light of hunger is going to switch on and we’re going to be hungry. And so the easiest way that we can come in and make sure our appetite works properly and is not leading us to overconsume calories is by being proactive with getting enough protein in. That’s the main thing that trips people up. Once we’ve solved that, if we’re getting a reasonable amount, say 80% from nutrient dense whole foods, then we’re very likely getting everything we need. Appetite’s going to work properly and we’re not going to want to eat. I honestly have clients that start hitting their protein target and then complain very quickly that they’re too full and they can’t hit their calories that they’re aiming for, even if they’re aiming for fat loss.
You’d be surprised how easy it is to maintain or drop weight once you’re actually fueling your body properly. This is a huge part is why I start with this huge part of why it’s been so easy for me to stay lean for so long. Give your body what it needs. You don’t need to fart it signals anymore. And so this does not have to be complicated or difficult. If we aim for 1.8 grammes per kilogramme of lean body weight or goal body weight, then we’ve got ample and you can get most of this in one mil a day. This does not have to be difficult. I’m hitting one meal once a day that’s got a hundred to 120 grammes and then I’m going to get my remaining quota, get to 1 40, 1 50 very easily without having to think about what I eat for dinner or snacks, 500 grammes of meat, some cheese done, that’s lunch diet sorted.
You can literally handle it in one meal a day. That’s relatively simple and easy to solve. This is where things get more complicated. If the basic holes in your diet are field and it’s difficult to maintain the body fat that you’re at, the only other factor that is really at play here is your overall body weight. Talk about this in other videos, but basically the limiting factor on how lean you can get at this point in your life is how much muscle mass is currently on your body because for you, your body, there’ll be this weight range that your body’s really happy sitting in regardless of your body composition. And so if you’re currently trying to cut down below this weight and you get below this line, your body starts to fight back and say, no, no, no, we want to get back up to healthy weight range.
You get hungrier and your body works to help you gain weight again. So long-term, the way that we can actually be lean and maintain is by having enough muscle, but if you are currently hitting this threshold, you’re still not as lean as you want to be. What do you do? This can feel really confusing and frustrating. I’ve been there. I’m going to give you the strategy that works and it doesn’t involve hardcore, bulky, gaining a bunch of fat. There’s a few steps to this process. The first is that we just want to get lean enough and what that basically looks like is getting to the lower end of our healthy happy weight range before things start to get difficult. Think about this whole model of healthy weight range like a rubber band. If you get to the threshold below which your body’s not happy sitting, then it’s like getting the rubber band taught.
If we keep pushing and keep trying to lose weight and keep trying to cut down further, get leaner at our current level of muscle mass and we start dropping below this threshold, it’s like stretching out that rubber band past the level of being taught. And the further we go, the further we try and push on, the harder it gets to continue and the more our body wants to snap us back up and get us back above that threshold body weight. So there’s no point going past that point. We just want to lose enough weight or enough body fat that the rubber van gets taught. And so what does that look like? Well, it’s basically getting to the point where losing weight, cutting down gets difficult. If you are approaching a calorie deficit properly, you got your diet sorted as per what we’ve gone through, you’re doing some strength training to maintain muscle mass.
We just want to die until it stops being a positive experience. You notice similarities here to training. If we learn to listen to our body signals, we can get a whole lot more out of them with a whole lot less pain. So that’s the first step. Get lean enough. I remember in the past cutting down getting super lean, shredded for the body weight that I was at and it would always be easy for a time and then it would get difficult towards that lower body fat percentage. And in hindsight, I realise now I was just dipping below this line and then I thought when I stopped cutting, I would always rebound back up and gain body fat back. And I thought that it was just simply like your body never wanted to stay lean. It would always just try and make you fat. And I think this holds a lot of people back from just committing to long-term process.
It’s not that you can’t stay lean. I’ve maintained a six pack for many years now and you see that body fat percentage that I walk around with year round is quite an awesome level. It’s what I always wanted when I was younger. It’s just that you go below this weight, your body’s going to rebound back. And so if you just get to that threshold, the point where cutting’s no longer a fun experience, it’s now difficult, we stop. You’re going to stay there really happily. Okay, so we get lean enough and this bear in mind, if you haven’t spent a lot of years training building muscle mass, this might not be that lean. I mean you’re going to be athletic, you’re going to look healthy, but you might not have a six pack at this point and that’s okay. The point is we get to a starting point.
We get our best starting baseline that we can, that our bodies are currently capable of, happily maintained, and then we get to work building that muscle. If you finish your weight loss period, you keep your protein in place, you keep doing everything the same, but you just back off calorie restriction, you eat to appetite, you focus on training and progressing with your strength, your body’s going to build muscle. And if you’re within this healthy range, this is the beauty of it. If you haven’t gone below the threshold, then your body is in no rush to gain body fat. You don’t just get in worse shape. What usually happens, and I’ve seen this over and over again with a lot of clients, is that once you get the muscle building stuff in place, training and protein, you just get leaner. So even though your body weight starts to increase and you go even up further within this healthy weight range, you’re actually re-comp.
Your body builds muscle. And if it keeps the same level of body fat, which is the worst case scenario that usually happens, then you actually get leaner because your body weight increases whilst keeping your body fat the same. But what often happens is that your body goes more like this on a slower trajectory even though you’re gaining muscle because you lose fat at the same time purely as a result of getting stronger building muscle tissue. So first step, get lean enough, stay within a healthy weight range, second step, go to work, building muscle, getting stronger, focusing on training and fueling to appetite. The final step is to then just keep getting leaner as you go. And so yes, you’re probably going to notice your physique continuously improving over time as you get stronger build muscle. But what you’ll notice is over time, that rubber band that we’ve stretched out to taut here is going to slowly get some slack in it either because you’ve gained a bit of body fat, normal part of the process, it can happen, it does happen and you don’t want to worry about it.
But also because your weight has increased because of muscle mass, you can now get to a leaner level happily while staying within your healthy body weight range. So then you can do the same thing that you did the first time. You can hit a calorie deficit four to 12 weeks, drop two to six kilos, and now you’ve gone back down to your new lean enough, which is leaner than it was before. And so in terms of timeline with this, the easiest ratio to think about is at least three months of, I don’t want to call it bulking, but gaining, eating to appetite, getting stronger, building muscle, three months of that to one month calorie deficit. And so each year that looks like up to one 12 week period in a deficit. And it doesn’t really matter how you approach that. If you go three months gains, one a month cut or you do nine months gains, three month cut and this isn’t perfect over time you’ll do less and less calorie deficits because you’re focused mean now is just purely on gaining muscle.
Once you get to a body weight range that is really lean, you don’t really ever leave it until you just stay there all the time and focus on building muscle. But this gives you a starting point, at least in the early days. Get lean once. If you’ve got heaps of body fat, maybe it does take you a few 12 weeks cycles to get there to that lean enough state, but once you’ve done that, you’re there. You’ve got your baseline, and then it just becomes this iterative cycle of spending three, nine months gaining. I spend one to three months tightening things up, getting leaner than you were before, and you just iterate your way to a stronger leaner physique That’s always within your healthy body weight range. That always feels good and that every month looks better and better. It still sometimes shocks me what my default body composition is now, how lean I’m just by listening to these signals, but it’s because I’ve spent 10 years building as much muscle as I possibly can.
Yes, it only needs to take 40 minutes a week. It still takes a long time, but this is what you get from it. Once you have built that base, even a good two, three years of consistent training, you can easily be maintaining a six pack without stress or effort. It’s not that complicated. It’s not that hard and it doesn’t actually need to take that long, but you do have to have the right process in place. Getting below here, yes, it means that you’re likely to rebound. It also makes it much more difficult to build that muscle. And so you can get stuck in a cycle here. Not being as lean as you want, not building more muscle to then eventually get as long as you want. And I guess the last thing to say on this is when you are in these phases of gaining muscle and strength and focusing on your training and listening to appetite, don’t stress.
If you do gain fat, you’ve got the skill ready in your back pocket to get rid of it. Again, it’s like your safety net when you’re doing one thing, do it properly. You don’t have to be gaining body fat, but if you do, it’s not the end of the world. It’s going to come off again, and there’s no point letting that inhibit your focus on gains when you’re trying to gain. So that in a nutshell is how you maintain a six pack without hard work. Obviously, the first step is to get proper training in place. So if you don’t already have a strength training system, getting you stronger every single week, again, that can be done at home in 40 minutes a week. Get that in place first. Then sort the base of your diet, make sure you’re hitting that protein target. One good meal a day you sorted. Then you can layer this on top. If you’re not lean enough already, you can start working your way there. Get lean once and then improve forever. If you want to get all this done as soon as possible, training, nutrition, fat loss links, my free training is in the description below. Otherwise, get after this, start making it happen. If you’ve got questions, drop ’em in the comments. Lemme know what you want to hear more about and I’ll endeavour to answer those questions. In the meantime, here’s another video you can check out. I’ll see you soon.