How Much Fat Is Covering Your Abs?

There are, as I see it, four classic ways to be lean:

1. There’s hunger-striker lean, achieved with starvation, and not recommended by any major medical organisation.

2. There’s heroin-addict lean, achieved most notably by Iggy Pop during the early seventies…and mysteriously retained for decades after he quit using drugs.

3. There’s marathon-runner lean, which is a lot healthier than the first two but probably not what you had in mind when you clicked on this article.

4. And there’s cover-model lean, which I assume everyone reading this aspires to.

WATCH: Fact check what you think you know about fat

That fourth look - made famous by the men who fronted Men’s Health magazine in the nineties and early 2000s - is achieved with a combination of the most muscle you can maintain and the lowest body-fat percentage you can achieve. The two processes are inextricably linked: you can’t gain a lot of muscle without also gaining some fat, and you can’t lose a lot of fat without sacrificing some muscle.

Lean in
Let's start by examining how lean a man can naturally get, based on the best example we have: natural bodybuilders. That’s the full shred, with abs that are visible from space and skin so tight you hurt your fingers trying to grab enough to pinch.

Eric Helms knows what it’s like to get down into that range. He’s a Ph.D. candidate at Auckland University of Technology and a pro natural bodybuilder who has reached an estimated five per cent fat at a body weight of 82 kilograms. That means he carried just four kilograms of fat on his six-foot frame.

MORE: 10 exercises that burn more calories than running

How difficult is it to get to that point?

“At the end it’s harder than boot camp,” Helms says. He means it literally: he served in the Air Force, and has compared notes with friends from other military branches.

We’ll get to the details in a moment. First, though, we’ll take a closer look at the challenge of body-fat reduction, what the leanest of the lean do to reach that impeccable condition, and what guys like us can learn from their experiences to help achieve a realistic body-fat level - one that probably won’t get your picture in a supplement ad, but will definitely get you closer to that ideal than you are now.
Long road to a hard body

The average Australian male has a BMI of 27. A relatively strong and fit gym rat, Helms says, probably has body fat in the range of 12 to 16 per cent. That guy probably can’t see his abs yet - not all of them, anyway, and not all the time. But he has the consolation of knowing he’s in the top five per cent of all men. To get from there to a pose-worthy physique, with low-single-digit body fat, Helms says he’d probably need to lose nine to 18 kilograms.

Even a working fitness model, someone whose living depends on his abs and is almost always the best-built guy in the room, is probably 9 to 18 kilograms away from being as lean as he could possibly be.

Not all of that lost weight will be fat. In three recently published case studies of competitive natural bodybuilders, they lost a lot of muscle - between 20 and 43 per cent of the total weight they dropped.

Helms thinks those numbers sound a little high. “I would say the normal range is between 20 and 30 per cent,” he says. “If you lose 20 per cent or lower, you did a good job holding onto muscle mass.” Still, there’s no way to get around this fact: the leaner you get, the higher the proportion of muscle you’ll lose.

The key, Helms says, is to give yourself plenty of time to reach your goal, no matter what it is. A bodybuilder starting with low-double-digit body fat needs, on average, about six months to become “totally peeled.” That’s with a diet that gets progressively restrained and a workout program that becomes incrementally more time-consuming. By the end he’ll be eating just four to five calories per kilogram of body weight while lifting four to six days a week and doing some form of cardio four to seven days.

The leaner you get, the harder your body fights back, and that’s when it starts to mess with your mind. “Emotional stress levels get much higher than normal, especially at the end,” Helms says. “Libido disappears at a certain point. Lethargy hits pretty bad, and irritability and obsessiveness get out of control in most people.”

GALLERY: 10 workouts that take 10 minutes or less

“Good enough” is actually great
That leads to this surprising advice: “The average guy simply should not try to cut to four to five per cent body fat,” Helms says.

For one thing, the final result may not give you the look you wanted. Picture this: you start out as a 80kg with 14 per cent fat. You lose nine kilograms to get down to five per cent. Your loss includes seven kilograms of fat and just two kilograms of lean tissue. The friends who see your shirtless selfies on Instagram will indeed marvel at your magnificent, ultralean physique.

But to the rest of the world, the people who see you every day? Unless you work as a lifeguard or a stripper, or find some other way to spend a lot of time undressed, you’ll just look like a guy who lost nine kilograms for reasons that mystify most of the people you know.

For another, it’s unsustainable. “Most guys who diet to sub-8 per cent just end up overeating themselves back to where they started, or higher, within weeks of achieving the goal,” Helms says.

A minuscule percentage of males can maintain super-low body fat, but Helms estimates it’s one in a thousand. For everyone else, it’s psychologically damaging to try. “It lends itself toward disordered eating,” he says.
A more reasonable goal is to work toward your “settling point.” That, Helms says, is the lowest body-fat level you can sustain while still making progress in the weight room and without making yourself miserable. Whatever it is, it is. It’s not a measure of your courage or self-discipline. And most of all, it’s not a contest. One guy may be able to sustain eight per cent fat with less effort than it takes you to stay at 12 per cent. That’s just the luck of the draw, and very few of us are gifted with a settling point in the permanent-six-pack range.

But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. “I joke that when I’m single-digit body fat, if my wife walked in front of me completely naked, holding a pizza, I wouldn’t notice that she was naked,” Helms says.

So that’s your standard: If you spend more time thinking about pizza than sex, it’s probably time to back off your diet and start enjoying life with the physique you worked so hard to build.

Lou Schuler is an award-winning journalist and the author, with Alan Aragon, of The Lean Muscle Diet.