The Trans Masc Lifter’s Guide to Visible Abs

For me fitness is not only having a good physique but it is the overall lifestyle which I follow in my life.
––Mohit Raina

If you’re looking for a comprehensive guide that covers:
 

• What you need to do to get abs
• The pros and cons of getting and maintaining visible abs
• Differences between trans masc people and cis men

 
Keep reading.

Is it true that “abs are made in the kitchen”?

To use a phrase that’s equally cheesy but more accurate, abs are built in the gym and revealed in the kitchen.

Getting abs involves a two-step process:

1. Build them.

2. Get lean enough to expose them.

For some people, these two steps are relatively easy.

These are people who:
 

• Stay lean easily and, if anything, struggle to gain weight
• Have enough abdominal muscle
• Have a favourable body fat distribution (due to genetics), so they don’t carry much fat around the abdomen

 
For others, getting abs requires a longer timeframe and greater effort.

How to build your abs

By “abs”, I’m referring to the rectus abdominis, which is the “six-pack” muscle running from the bottom of your ribcage to the top of your pelvis:

To build them, you need to apply the following principles of hypertrophy:

1. Specificity

Choose exercises that train the rectus abdominis directly.

I usually program one exercise that feels harder in the upper portion of the abs (ribs to pelvis), like a crunch, and one that feels harder in the lower portion (pelvis to ribs), like a leg raise.

2. Volume and proximity to failure

While volume needs are individual, 10 to 20 sets close enough to failure per week is a good rule of thumb for hypertrophy (click, click).

Since abs tend to recover pretty easily from training, and ab exercises are pretty safe, I usually train and program every set to muscular failure.

Furthermore, recent research suggests that doing more than 11 sets for the same muscle in a single session doesn’t seem to yield any more detectable muscle growth.

In addition, the more sets you do, the more fatigued you get, which leads to a decrease in performance.

Taking these two factors into account, it may be better to spread the same number of sets across multiple sessions, especially if you’re doing more than 11 sets per week.

That’s why I tend to program abs multiple times per week, including on back-to-back days.

3. Targeted form

Your form should enable you to stimulate the specific muscle you’re trying to grow, without notable compensation from other structures or from momentum.

These are the two most common form mistakes I’ve seen:

• Turning standard and decline crunches into sit-ups
• Moving your hips back and forth on cable crunches

 
These mistakes typically involve the hip flexors and/or the lower back muscles, thus reducing the emphasis on the abs.

To help you avoid them, I made this reel on form fundamentals.

How to expose your abs

If you’ve been training abs but can’t see them yet, you need to cut until you’ve lost enough fat from around your abdomen to display them.

Most people lose fat from the inside out (visceral fat around your organs first, then subcutaneous fat under your skin) and from the top down (head to toe).

For this reason, you’ll likely uncover the two upper abs first, followed by the rest.

For most cis men, trans masc people who’ve undergone fat redistribution, and cis women with a more typically “male” fat distribution pattern, the lower abdomen is one of the most stubborn fat loss areas and will likely take the longest to lean out.

Can anyone get visible abs and maintain them?

Anyone who’s built them can get visible abs.

Maintaining them is a different story, depending on how visible we’re talking relative to your current dieting skills and to the lowest body fat percentage you can healthily maintain.

If you want really shredded abs, you’ll likely be cutting for a long time, which is already difficult enough to accomplish in and of itself. So your dieting skills need to match this level of challenge.

When and if you do succeed, if your goal leanness is pretty extreme, you can end up dieting below your lower body fat intervention point, based on Speakman’s dual set point theory.

In other words, you end up dieting below the minimum amount of fat your body requires to feel good and perform all its physiological functions properly.

This lower intervention point isn’t the same for everyone.

If you get below this threshold, you usually experience the following on a regular basis:

• Fatigue
• Hunger
• High food focus
• Mood swings
• Difficulty sleeping
• Low libido

 
You’ll also feel highly critical of your appearance, struggle to make much or any progress with your training, and develop disordered eating behaviours and negative body image thoughts.

Internally, your thyroid and sex hormone levels will be tanked – unless you’re on exogenous hormones – which is not ideal for your long-term health.

Moreover, your body is in a state of low energy availability (LEA), in which the calories you’re eating aren’t enough to support the body’s essential physiological functions after accounting for the calories you’re burning through exercise.
 
In other words, the body doesn’t have enough available energy to perform both functions that are necessary for life, like breathing, and those that aren’t, like having children or growing muscle.

As a result, it slows down or stops all unnecessary physiological functions. That’s why cis women in this state don’t have a menstrual cycle, and why people in general tend to struggle to make progress in the gym.

Even if you are on exogenous hormones, you can still experience these unsavoury symptoms and LEA. Therefore, whether taking exogenous hormones or not, this is not a healthy state to be in for prolonged periods of time.

So, if you need to get to this point for your abs to be as visible as you want them to be, it’s probably better to accept a slightly higher body fat percentage. Even without being shredded to the bone, you can still have somewhat visible abs and thrive in life.

As a visual example, I dieted past my lower intervention point for my last photoshoot back in 2022.

At the time, my physique looked like this at around 96-98 lbs:

​I loved having such shredded abs, but I absolutely hated how I felt.

As of March 2026, as you can see in the picture below, my abs are still visible, but not quite to the same extent. Most importantly, I’m not in a state of LEA and I’m not compromising my long-term health.

How long will it take to achieve visible abs?

I started bodybuilding in 2018 and spent four years cutting and bulking before achieving my 2022 photoshoot shape. The photoshoot diet itself lasted nearly seven months, from the start of February to mid-August 2022.

Importantly, I wouldn’t have been able to sustain such a long and gruelling diet if I hadn’t already developed good fat loss skills in previous cutting phases.

I can’t give you a one-size-fits-all answer, but I can give you some perspective based on my personal experience and nearly seven years of coaching hundreds of clients.
 
For most people like me, for whom it isn’t easy to have visible abs, achieving them takes at least three to five years of consistent training and nutrition, even if you don’t intend to get as shredded as I did for my shoot.

If you want to expedite this process, hiring a good coach is the single best investment you can make for three reasons.

First off, a coach will strategically map out your cutting and bulking phases instead of jumping from one to the other with no rhyme or reason.

Second, they will help you develop your dieting and training skills, increase muscle mass, and nurture the right mindset to complete the kind of challenging diet required to achieve your goal.

Last but not least, they can help you accomplish all this in the healthiest way possible, lowering your risk of worsening your physical health and psychological relationship with food, your body, and training.

What changes for trans masc people compared to cis men?

Physiologically, nothing.

However, the following three key differences in your lived experience can affect the process:
 
1.Body fat redistribution from testosterone (T) therapy
2.Length of time spent on T
3.Diet culture messaging
 
1. Body fat redistribution from T therapy
 
After a long enough time on testosterone therapy – and assuming your levels are within the cis male range – your body fat will likely redistribute in a more typically “male” pattern, with leaner limbs and more fat around the abdomen.
 
This will make getting visible abs harder than it was pre-T.

In some cases, though, building enough muscle will make up for this.

For example, take a look at the pictures below.

In the first one, from 2019, I weighed around 100 lbs and hadn’t started T yet. My body was small and relatively lean, but my stomach was pretty flat rather than muscular:

In the second picture, from February 2026, I weigh around 111 lbs (10+ lbs more than in 2019), and my abs look more visible, even though I’ve definitely undergone a lot of fat redistribution since my pre-T days:

2. Length of time spent on T

Research suggests that both sexes can build the same relative amount of muscle (click, click). However, AMAB people make greater absolute gains because they have more muscle mass to begin with, which they develop when their testosterone levels rise during puberty.
 
If you haven’t had the same T levels as a cis man for as long as one of them, then you won’t have developed that extra baseline muscle during puberty.

For this reason, it may take you longer to grow your abs than if you’d had the same testosterone levels all along.

3. Diet culture messaging

It’s more common for AFAB than for AMAB individuals to grow up surrounded by diet culture messages pressuring them to be as small and light as possible. As a result, they may be more likely to have a restrictive relationship with food.

In addition, eating disorder rates in the trans community as a whole are relatively high.

Personally, I first thought I wanted to lose weight when I was three years old.

Eleven years later, at about fourteen, I developed anorexia nervosa.

While full-blown eating disorders are rarer, disordered eating behaviours and thoughts are more common. I’ve certainly worked and currently work with many clients who need(ed) to repair their relationship with food because of similar childhood experiences.

This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to get visible abs.

But you may need to be more mindful of nurturing your relationship with food and body image in this pursuit than if you hadn’t been fed diet culture bullshit since you were little.

In summary:

• To build your abs, you need to train them directly, with proper form, enough volume, and a close enough proximity to failure.
• To reveal them, you need to have a lean enough stomach, either naturally or by cutting.
• While anyone can get visible abs, whether you can maintain them or not depends on how shredded you want them to be and whether you need to dip below your lower body fat intervention point to get there.

 
Bonus:

These are some free bonus resources specifically dedicated to cutting:

• If you haven’t taken it yet, sign up for my free “No Quit Kit” five-day email course on how to lose fat and keep it off for the long haul
• Podcast: Should you cut or bulk first?
• Podcast: Six skills to develop BEFORE a successful fat loss phase
• Podcast: Why you stop sticking to your diet (and what to do about it)

 
Thanks for reading. May you make the best gains.
 
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