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visit portal.evilfitness.com. I'm Dr. Shannon Ritchie. I'm a doctor of physical therapy, fitness trainer, and founder

of Ethelow Fitness. In the Dr. Shannon show, you'll learn applicable tools to improve your

health based on science. Welcome to the show.

Hi, everyone. We have a mini episode because we were coming across comments recently on some posts,

and we were just seeing a bunch of this on social media. So we wanted to address this today.

Why would we want to build muscle in the abdomen? Wouldn't that make the waist thicker? Okay,

I have so many thoughts about this. What do you think about this? It seems to be more and more common on social

media, which always makes me take a little step back to think, like, is there any truth in this?

Is this all marketing? What's going on here? Or what is this based in? And in just thinking before we kind of dove into any of

the research or anything behind it, just thinking anecdotally about the platform and all the

women on the platform and ourselves and all of the things, like that's never been a complaint

that we've heard of, that there has been this significant increase in the thickness of the abdominals

by training the abdominals. When we think about training in general in a well-balanced training

routine, the abdominals are a huge part of that. If you were just neglecting to train them at all,

that could create an imbalance that would be

really detrimental to our function, to our spine health, to how we move about our day-to-day

lives, all in the pursuit of a specific aesthetic that might not be realistic or even something that you should quote unquote want based on

your body type. So it's just, I just have a lot of thoughts. Yeah. I think if someone wants a smaller

waist that's primarily going to be fat loss, which is related mainly to nutrition. Right. I looked

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