You finally did it! You’ve worked so hard and put so much dedication and effort into getting in shape and now you’ve never looked better. Everywhere you go, you get compliments about how great your physique looks, and at the beach, everybody stares at your shredded abs. After you reached this point, you decided to take a break, and lo and behold, your abs are completely gone! This is the biggest fear of most people that worked so hard to shape their abs, but could it really happen? In other words, can you lose abs?
Losing abs is possible. When you don’t engage your body in physical activity, your muscle mass decreases and you start building up fat, especially in the midsection which makes abs less or not visible at all.
In this article, we’ll talk about if you can lose abs, how long it takes, and the main reasons why it happens.
Table of Contents
Can You Lose Abs?
Before answering this question, I’ll talk about my own experience of losing my abs. As a bit of backstory, I always struggled with being skinny but managed to change my body and the way I look after just 3 years when I started weight-lifting. I gained almost 40 pounds of pure muscles and built up a nice physique with decent pecs, shoulders, back, and of course, shredded abs.
I remember one time during that period (somewhere between the 2 and 3-year mark), I had to take a break of more than 2 months due to some personal reasons and during that time, I definitely noticed that my abs were getting less visible (they were still there but their visibility decreased significantly).
Not only did my abs become less visible, but my entire body lost a little bit of muscle mass and replaced it with fat. And that’s exactly what happens when you don’t train or engage in physical activity for more than 2 months.
After those 2 months of inactivity, I decided to bounce back into training and managed to regain the initial shape that I lost and I looked even better afterward.
What You Should Know
Abs can definitely be lost if you’re lacking in terms of activity, but why is that the case? When you stop engaging in any form of physical activity, your body decides that it’s no longer necessary for your muscles to be big since it’s considered a liability that you rarely use, so he makes them smaller in order to save up energy for other important stuff like breathing, digesting, and so on. When that happens, you’ll have a lot of extra energy left (especially if you consume a lot of calories) that can be stored as fat in your body.
For men, that fat is mainly stored in the belly. So a combination of decreased muscle mass in the entire body and the fact that you store more fat, especially in the midsection means that your abs will become less visible or disappear entirely if you don’t bounce back into training.
How Long Does it Take To Lose Your Abs?
Before answering this question, let’s look at a little experiment conducted by researchers at The Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences at the University of Copenhagen.
They concluded that after just two weeks of muscle immobilization (which represents complete inactivity), people lose about 25 to 30% of their muscle mass. However, we can modify this conclusion to match our current topic.
In their case, the muscles (legs) were completely immobilized, meaning that they didn’t move at all during the entirety of the experiment which is the main reason why it took only 2 weeks to start noticing muscle loss. However, in our case, it’s impossible to completely immobilize the abs since they’re part of the core which is constantly engaged even while doing basic activities like walking, standing up, lifting a heavy object, and so on. This means that it will take a lot more time than just 2 weeks before you lose your abs, but it highly depends on many factors that we’ll explain in the next section.
In other words, it takes about three to seven weeks of inactivity before you start losing your abs. However, that period of time entirely depends on how long you’ve been inactive, the number of calories that you consume, and your genetics.
The Main Reasons Why You Lose Your Abs
There are numerous factors that can make you lose your abs. According to the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, the three main factors that cause muscle loss (including the abs), are atrophy (a fancy way of saying lack of activity), aging, and some diseases. Let’s break each one of these factors down and add even more.
Atrophy
As I mentioned earlier, atrophy is the main reason why muscles including the abs are lost. The body is such a fascinating system that’s capable of doing a lot of amazing feats. One of them is the ability to adapt to any environment and come up with the best logical way to overcome it.
When you’re constantly training in the gym and lifting those heavy weights, your body is faced with a new environment and new challenges that it needs to overcome. In order to do that, it increases your muscle mass so it can adapt itself to heavier weights and that’s the main reason why you eventually get stronger and become bigger.
Logically, if you do the complete opposite of physical activity, your body thinks that it no longer needs those big muscles so it simply gets rid of them to save up more energy for other important stuff, and that’s exactly why you lose muscle mass.
And like I mentioned in the beginning, you’ll automatically build up fat since you have a lot of extra energy to spare which makes your abs less visible or not visible at all.
Aging
Aging could also be one of the main factors why you’re losing abs. It’s extremely rare to see someone old with big muscles or shredded abs. The more you age, the more likely you’ll lose your muscle mass.
According to the Current Opinion in Clinical Nutrition & Metabolic Care, your muscle mass will start to decrease by approximately 3 to 8% per decade after you hit the age of 30. When you reach 60, this rate is significantly increased.
Diseases
Although that’s likely not the case for you, there are also certain diseases that cause muscle loss. According to the Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, these include acute critical illness, cancer, diseases associated with chronic inflammation, and neurological disorders.
There are also other diseases that cause an increase in body fat like obesity which will cause your abs to fade away.
These are rare cases and more likely not to happen to you, but it’s always a good idea to check with your doctor and get rid of any doubts.
Genetics
As I mentioned in the beginning, it takes about three to seven weeks before you start losing your abs. However, that time can take a lot less or a lot more based on your genetics. There are some people that would stay inactive for months and still keep the visibility of their abs and this is most likely due to the fact that they naturally have a low body fat percentage. There are also others that would lose the visibility of their even after a week of inactivity simply because they naturally lose muscles and gain fat at a fast rate.
Conclusion:
If one day you decided to take a break and notice that your abs are becoming less visible, don’t worry and don’t panic since it’s completely normal for that to happen. It’s likely due to your lack of activity, the fact you’ve been consuming more calories, and that you’ve been cursed genetically. But be sure that if you bounce back into physical activity and follow the right diet, you’ll get your abs again in no time.
